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By Root 2484 0

to the Pentagon for military briefings on their impending trip to North Africa. The War Department gave them an appointment for yellow fever vaccinations the next morning in the Pentagon dispensary. Foxworth appeared uneasy about the journey. G. O. Burton, an FBI agent who drove the two men to the War Department, wrote that day that ‘Mr. Foxworth attempted to secure from the Colonel information about the trip such as type of plane to be used.’ Burton took Foxworth and Haberfeld the next morning to the Pentagon for their inoculations and then to Gravelly Point Airport for a 10.50 a.m. flight to Miami, Florida, in a four-engine Douglas Aircraft military transport. From Miami, they would go to Natal, Brazil, to fly to one of the nearest points in Africa to the western hemisphere, either Accra or Dakar, and on to Algiers. Because military transports flew only in daylight, the two FBI men were not scheduled to see Charles Bedaux in North Africa for five days.

While agents Foxworth and Haberfeld were heading to Miami, the State Department at last disclosed Charles Bedaux’s arrest to the press. ‘Charles E. Bedaux, friend of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, has been arrested on charges of trading with the enemy,’ the New York Times reported on its front page the next morning. ‘Secretary of State Cordell Hull said today he had been informed of the arrest but had no details.’ Cordell Hull’s claim of ignorance would not stand even a cursory scrutiny of the voluminous correspondence that he and his department had exchanged on Charles Bedaux for the previous two years. The FBI was dismayed that the State Department had leaked Bedaux’s arrest to the press, D. M. Ladd calling it in a memorandum ‘quite disappointing’. Someone, probably in the State Department, told the New York Times and Time magazine that Bedaux had gone to North Africa to corner the orange crop, but no press report mentioned his pipeline. Bedaux, held incommunicado in Algeria, was not permitted to see journalists and tell his story.

The New York Times interviewed Albert Ramond, who had taken control of Bedaux’s American company in 1937. Ramond explained that his former boss was ‘a man who loves danger for the sheer pleasure of seeing whether he can get out of it’. Ramond defended Bedaux: ‘He was a good American, naturalized twenty years ago, and he had always a soft spot for his native France. I cannot conceive his selling out to the enemy.’

Gaston Bedaux recalled that the press in Paris also reported Charles’s arrest, but dropped the story ‘for a long time’. Information about his brother was difficult to obtain. ‘Communications between Africa and us was [sic] totally interrupted,’ he wrote. Fern, who had heard nothing from Charles since his first arrest, was effectively a hostage at Candé against her husband’s return. All she knew by mid-January was that the Americans were holding him.

Although the State Department informed the press that Bedaux stood accused of ‘trading with the enemy’ with a maximum penalty of ‘ten years’ imprisonment, a $10,000 fine and forfeiture of property used in the offense’, no one told Bedaux of what he was accused. He and his son could not prepare a defence until they knew what the charges were. They gradually adapted to US Army routine. They ate in the soldiers’ canteen and shared their bathroom. When the MPs got to know Bedaux better, they stopped posting an armed guard outside his door.

Confinement was forcing father and son into an unaccustomed intimacy. Until now, they were almost strangers. Waiting in the desert, they had time to discover why they never liked each other.

Percy Foxworth and Harold Haberfeld of the FBI did not reach Algiers to see Charles Bedaux as planned on 18 January. Foxworth had been right to show concern about the ‘type of plane to be used’. Soon after their military aircraft took off from the airfield at Natal, Brazil, for the eastward crossing of the Atlantic, it crashed. Everyone on board died. The FBI sent two other operatives to Algeria, but they did not have Foxworth’s long experience investigating