Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [154]
While Charles Bedaux reminisced with his son in Algeria, the one he wished he had had, Frederic Ledebur, was being tailed by the FBI in California and New York. FBI agents there interviewed everyone who knew him, and they kept a close watch on his activities, opened his mail and reported regularly on him to J. Edgar Hoover. Many of the sources the FBI relied upon, as it delved deeper into Ledebur’s affairs, contradicted previous denunciations of him as a pro-Nazi immigrant taking pictures of West Coast naval bases. An FBI intelligence report of 8 April 1943 concluded, ‘No indication subject engaging in espionage or distributing Nazi propaganda.’ One source helpfully suggested that ‘he still wants U.S. citizenship in order to join U.S. Army’. Nonetheless, the FBI had its doubts about Lebedur: ‘Acquaintances characterize subject as improvident, lazy, immoral individual.’
Interest in Bedaux reached the highest levels of American and British intelligence. A working committee meeting in New York of the Hemisphere Intelligence Conference, which grouped together senior American and British spymasters, discussed Bedaux at length on 24 March 1943. It suggested that ‘Watchdog’, one of their most important spies in Germany, be contacted about Bedaux. The minutes of the monthly meeting listed two questions for Watchdog. The first concerned a new type of ship locater that the German navy had reportedly installed in the conning towers of its U-boats. The committee wanted to know if Watchdog, on a recent trip to the Canadian coast aboard a U-boat, noticed anyone stationed in the submarine’s conning tower. The second question was, ‘Did Watchdog, who was in North Africa at the same time as Charles Bedaux, know or hear of him there? As both Bedaux and Watchdog were allegedly associated with the German Armistice Commission, it was thought that Watchdog might produce additional evidence of Bedaux’s security activities at that time.’ Bedaux had no connection to the Armistice Commission, but a general from the commission had displaced him from his room at the Hôtel Aletti on the night of the invasion. He may have been the same Armistice Commission officer who was captured by the American army and placed in a prisoner of war camp in Trinidad, Colorado. The FBI interrogated the German in September 1943 on the case of ‘Charles Eugene Bedaux;–(Mission Bedaux); Trading with the enemy’. The FBI was nothing if not thorough in its pursuit of evidence in the Bedaux case. The main problem was that none of Bedaux’s friends in the United States, including Frederic Ledebur, had seen him since the United States and Germany went to war in December 1941.
THIRTY-FOUR
A Hospital at War
ON 4 APRIL 1943, DR SUMNER JACKSON watched well over a hundred American B-17 bombers, the famous ten-man Flying Fortresses, bomb Paris in daylight for the first time. The roof of the American Hospital afforded a clear view of the planes unleashing tons of high explosives on an island nearby in the River Seine. Their target was the Renault car factory, which manufactured tanks and other armoured vehicles for the Wehrmacht. German Focke-Wulf 190 fighter planes, scrambling only after the raid had begun at 2.16 p.m., pursued the bombers and clashed with their British fighter escorts. The spectacle encouraged Dr Jackson and the other physicians and nurses who had been longing for the United States to fight in France with more than words. France would not be freed immediately, they knew, but the American liberation of the skies had begun.
The heavens above Neuilly that spring afternoon saw the drama of bombardments, dogfights and crews leaping from their planes in parachutes to avoid being burned alive. Below, the Renault plant was on fire. The Luftwaffe shot down at least four of the B-17s and just as many fighter escorts. The air war was beginning to cost the Americans, as it had the British for two years, thousands of planes and crew-men.