Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [166]
John L. Burling, assistant to the Justice Department’s administrator of foreign travel control, had chaired the hearing in Miami’s Border Patrol Station. Bedaux represented himself, because his letter asking Mrs Waite and Albert Ramond for legal help arrived in New York after the hearings began. (The government apparently did not allow him to make a telephone call, nor did it inform the press that Bedaux was in the country.) The interrogations about his citizenship and his activities in German-occupied Europe and North Africa wearied, but did not unsettle, him. Burling asked if Bedaux understood the potential usefulness of the Trans-Saharan Railway, the aborted project on which Bedaux had worked, to the German army. Bedaux answered that the railway, even if the French had not cancelled it because of the high cost, would have been completed only when the war was over. Moreover, Germany’s contribution of 60,000 tons of steel to his peanut oil pipeline deprived the Wehrmacht of raw materials for tanks and other weapons of war. At one stage, Bedaux asked Burling, ‘What assurance do I have that in speaking all the truth I do not endanger innocent people?’ The ‘innocent people’ were his wife, brother and friends in occupied France. As the four-day hearing proceeded, Bedaux, despite his lack of sleep, was getting the better of Burling. Janet Flanner thought Bedaux’s candid responses might have harmed his case, but ‘he showed an ebullience, a charm, and a mixture of plausibility and candor which, coupled with his foreign-movie-star accent, might momentarily have panicked an American jury’.
Burling confronted Bedaux with a document that had been among the papers brought from North Africa along with his damning Ausweis from Otto Abetz and his cadre de mission from Pierre Laval. It was a German form with spaces for responses to questions about the Allies’ military plans in Africa, aeroplane arrivals and departures, shipping information on the port of Dakar and General de Gaulle’s signals codes. The paper, nestled among his many letters, passes and photographs, seemed to prove that he was not only trading with the enemy, but spying as well. Bedaux replied that he knew nothing of the document, insisting it must have been slipped into his briefcase during the three weeks that the French were in possession of it. If he had realized what the document was, he said, he would ‘have been insane not to destroy it’ when the briefcase was back in his possession.
On 18 January, J. Edgar Hoover cabled the FBI’s special agent in charge, San Francisco, ‘that [Frederic] Ledebur be interviewed before Bedaux’s attorney communicates with him regarding his connections with Bedaux and his knowledge of the activities of his brother Joseph’. Hoover had good intuition, or Mrs Waite and the Washington attorney she hired for Bedaux, Edmund Jones, were under FBI surveillance. Two days after the director instructed his field office to question Ledebur, Mrs Waite sent the Austrian a telegram: ‘OUR WASHINGTON ATTORNEY WILL SOON ARRANGE FOR YOUR COMING EAST SO YOU WILL BE AVAILABLE’. Ledebur was interviewed by FBI agents in Ventura, California, the day Mrs Waite sent the cable. He received it the next day, 21 January. The FBI questioned him again on 25 January in its Los Angeles office, when he was allowed to bring records to assist his memory. In both interviews, the Austrian gave details of his long association with Bedaux from their first meeting in Los Angeles in 1929 to their last in Amsterdam in 1939. He ‘denied any un-American activities’ and insisted it would have been impossible for him to film naval installations because he ‘had no idea how to operate a motion picture camera’. His loathing for his brother Joseph, who had not only been a Nazi but had betrayed his aristocratic heritage by working