Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [143]
Taylor’s memoirs made no mention of the fact that he met Bedaux with journalist John MacVane at the Hôtel Aletti two weeks earlier during a Luftwaffe attack.
On 5 December, a French officer of the Brigade of Surveillance drove to Bedaux’s hotel and announced, ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Bedaux, but you and your son will have to come with me.’ The Bedauxs were under arrest. The French locked them up in a police station overnight and took them to the Italian Club, which had been converted into a filthy and overcrowded prison. The Bedauxs were crammed into a makeshift cell with twenty other inmates, who had shared an open lavatory in a corner. Charles Bedaux, lord of the Château de Candé, slept on a hard concrete floor beside his cellmates from all corners of French Africa and waited for charges to be brought against him.
Eisenhower’s confidant and aide, Commander Harry C. Butcher, wrote in his diary for 8 December 1942, ‘Charles Bedaux, the stretch-out promoter with whom American labor leaders raised hell when he was discovered as the advance man for the Prince of Wales and the Duchess’ visit to US, has been arrested here by the French on charges of being a Nazi agent … They have photostats of certain letters appointing him as an industrial agent by the Germans … may be hung.’ The photostatic evidence had been given by Bedaux himself to Robert Murphy. Murphy did not reveal who gave it to the French.
The press did not report Bedaux’s arrest, although journalists in Algiers who learned of it attempted to. ‘I tried to broadcast the story,’ John MacVane wrote. ‘The censor stopped it. After submitting the story every day for ten days, I brought it up at an open conference with a high American authority. He said that not all the evidence had been collected and it was thought better not to break the story just yet. Other reporters then tried to write the story but could not get it passed.’
The affairs of Charles Bedaux had been under scrutiny in the United States for some time, however, before Edmond Taylor came upon Bedaux in Algiers. Percy E. Foxworth, the FBI’s assistant director in New York, was running the investigation into the case of Charles Eugene Bedaux. It had begun for him in February 1942 when he received a register of suspected Axis sympathizers in the United States from the Office of Naval Intelligence. The suspects were to be investigated and, if judged security threats, detained without trial. On 18 February, Foxworth forwarded the names of the ‘German, Italian, French, Spanish and miscellaneous suspected sympathizers to be considered for custodial detention’ to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. One of the ‘miscellaneous’ was ‘Bedaux, Charles Eugen [sic]’. Bedaux’s name–or variants of it, including Henri Bidaux–had been circulating in the intelligence community since September 1941, when the State Department received the cable from Vichy in which Bedaux disclosed his intention to develop the trans-Saharan Railway and gave his opinion that Germany would win the war.
The cable also said that Bedaux had asked the embassy for a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, adding the accusation that ‘he was perhaps trying to magnify the social problems which face the United States’. (Or he may have wanted to read a book that the Nazis had banned in Paris.) The case against Bedaux gained momentum in November 1941, when the American Consulate in Lisbon reported the allegations of Fern’s old friend, Katherine Rogers, about