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prison, as he had done in the First World War, and gone underground in the Vichy zone under Pétain’s protection. Murphy thought this national hero might be more acceptable to French officers in North Africa than General de Gaulle, whom many regarded as a traitor for rejecting the Armistice of 1940. Murphy was also courting Admiral Darlan, the anti-British commander of Vichy’s army and navy, who had come to Algiers to see his son. Alain Darlan, stationed there in the army, had just contracted poliomyelitis. President Roosevelt, whose own polio made him sympathetic, offered young Darlan medical care at Warm Springs, Georgia. Murphy believed the gesture would make the admiral amenable to the American cause.

Murphy, despite working round the clock for the invasion, found time for several meetings with Charles Bedaux. The first was on Murphy’s forty-eighth birthday, 28 October, the day after Bedaux’s arrival. Murphy’s three-page, single-space cable of 30 October to the secretary of state made clear that Bedaux was surprisingly candid about his plans. Bedaux described ‘the harsh treatment of the male internees in the early days at the camp in Compiègne’. He claimed to have asked the Germans to transfer the Americans to more comfortable dormitories at University City in Paris, where American volunteer ambulance drivers had stayed in 1940. Nothing came of his suggestion, but Bedaux was demonstrating that he had tried to help his countrymen under occupation. How had Bedaux himself been permitted to leave the camp? Murphy wrote, ‘Mr. Bedaux’s release, he states, was granted on the basis that he is charged by the French Government to perform a mission in French Africa and it was in that connection that he called upon me in Algiers. He said that he convinced General [Karl Heinrich] von Stülpnagel, in command of the German forces in occupied France, of the necessity of permitting France to build a strong French Africa.’

German support for the scheme included the allocation of 55,000 tons of steel at a time when the Wehrmacht was short of metal to manufacture weapons. Germany lent Bedaux 240 workers, who had been constructing the Trans-Saharan Railway. Most of them were prisoners of war or anti-Franco Spaniards and effectively slave labour. The Trans-Saharan Railway, Bedaux told Murphy, ‘had been definitely abandoned because of the enormous expense involved and the current lack of material and equipment’. The pipeline project was more important and would have a greater economic impact. Murphy’s memo continued, ‘According to this plan, the culture of peanuts in French West Africa is to be entirely reorganized and the center of the industry transferred from Dakar to Ouagadougou in the Ivory Coast, and the vast and fertile area in the bend of the Niger river, including parts of the Ivory Coast, French Soudan [sic] and the Niger colony, are to be exploited on a vast scale.’

Robert Murphy did not tell Bedaux anything about the impending invasion or that one of his ‘Group of Five’ allied agents was Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil. The French industrialist was Murphy’s link to General Giraud, and he carried messages back and forth across the Mediterranean between the two men. He was called alternately by Time magazine ‘a leading member of France’s financial aristocracy’ and ‘sleek Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, big time oilman, banker and part owner of the prewar pro-Fascist Paris Jour’. He had married Simone Lesieur, whose family owned the peanut oil company Huiles Lesieur. Through her inheritance, her husband was a peanut oil magnate with refineries on the West African coast. Bedaux’s pipeline would move the peanut oil industry inland, sending the oil more quickly and cheaply than Lesieur could from Dakar. Murphy saw Bedaux and Lemaigre-Dubreuil frequently in early November, but he did not indicate in his memoirs or his cables to Washington whether he told either about the other. Nor did he warn Bedaux that his dealings with the Nazis might be illegal.

Bedaux, in a display of innocence or boasting, provided Murphy with photostats of his German-issued