FDR's 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa (review)

FDR had an appetite for backchannel intelligence supplied by an inner circle of well-connected collaborators. And to be fair, outside of U.S. military intelligence, amateur operatives were about all that the United States could field at the beginning of World War II. The requirements for recruitment as a spy, if Vaughn's "apostles" offer a model, were limited to a cursory familiarity with foreign parts, a degree from a respectable university, and social connections sufficient to land a job at the Department of State.

Following in the footsteps of Arthur Layton Funk's 1974 book, The Politics of TORCH, Hal Vaughan, a retired U.S. diplomat living in Paris, chronicles the efforts of a posse of State Department "vice-counsels" under the affable but self-contented Milwaukeean Robert Murphy, the American counsel in Algiers, to "pave the way" for the November 1942 Allied invasion of French North Africa. Unfortunately, despite heroic attempts to prove the value of the intelligence gathering efforts of Murphy's "apostles," Vaughan's account reads more like Potholes for Dummies than a treatise on pavement. Indeed, one wonders how, given the amateurish and bungling nature of what today might be called "intelligence preparation of the battlefield," the Allies ever achieved surprise on the beaches of North Africa?

Only one of Murphy's "vice-counsels" was bilingual, few seemed to grasp what constituted militarily exploitable intelligence, and none exhibited the most elementary notions of security consciousness—indeed, so transparent were their actions that one gets the feeling that Vaughan might have discovered a more robust account of their activities in the papers of the Axis Armistice Commission in North Africa. Quoting OSS archives, Vaughan struggles to suggest that the deception operations run by the "apostles" drew a German flotilla to Dakar rather than to the Mediterranean at the critical moment of "Torch" (p. 157). But this assertion begs the question of where the Germans could have found a cruiser, a carrier (the Germans had only one aircraft carrier, laid up in a shipyard in the Baltic, the Graf Zeppelin), and a small armada of transports in October 1942, much less sail them to West Africa. Much of the valuable human intelligence passed on by the apostles seems to have been plagiarized from a Polish-run network in North Africa.

Murphy's second task was to persuade French officialdom to flock to the beaches to welcome the Allies with open arms. Unfortunately, the Midwesterner proved a novice in the complexities of French politics. He was manipulated by a klatch of right-wing extremists, more Vichyite than Pétain, led by Henri d'Astier de la Vigérie and Lemaigre Dubreuil, who pursued their own agenda. French imperial fears that if North Africa "becomes a battleground, it will be lost to France"(p. 151) mystified him. General Mark Clark's ill-advised, Murphy-impresarioed, visit in late October 1942 to meet with pro-Allied conspirators in a remote farmhouse near Cherchel not only proved to be the worst kept secret in Algeria, but nearly ended in the arrest of the American General (a potential bonus for those who had later to serve under him in Italy). But also, Clark's careless and water logged entourage left enough military paraphernalia strewn on the beach to alert Berlin and Rome, not to mention Vichy, of the impending invasion.

In the end, neither in intelligence gathering, nor in plans to line up support of Frenchmen sympathetic to the Allied cause, did Murphy register much success. Operation "Torch" appears to have succeeded despite the efforts of Murphy's team. Eisenhower complained that "none of Murphy's elaborate schemes were getting off the ground." "Duplicitous" was one of the kinder adjectives applied by the French to Murphy. Indeed, the unanswered question of Vaughan's book is why did the transparent...