Eisenhower, together with Hopkins and the rest of us, was accommodated in La Marsa, about twenty minutes outside the city center, in a beach-front French colonial house, a great wedding cake of a place with enormous and ornate blue doors.
The city of Tunis was bigger than I had imagined, and I thought it neither very Arab nor very African. Nor, for that matter, very French, either. After a short nap, I took a quick look at the famous souk and the mosque, and then sought out the Cafe M’Rabet, where I was to meet the OSS man in Tunis.
Ridgeway Poole had a Ph. D. in classical archaeology from Princeton and, already the author of one book on Hannibal and the Punic Wars, he had jumped at the chance of working for the OSS just a few miles from Carthage. He had been stationed in Tunis for just three months, working under vice-consular cover, but he knew the area very well, having worked on an important prewar excavation of the Antonine thermal baths. Fluent in Arabic and French, he seemed entirely at home in the cool interior of the cafe, sitting on a little platform, shoes off, smoking a sweet- smelling water pipe and sipping Arab tea.
“Sit down,” he said. “Take off your shoes. Have some tea.” Poole waved a waiter toward us and ordered without waiting for me to agree. “Pity you’re not here very long,” he said.
“Yes, isn’t it?” I said, trying to conceal my lack of enthusiasm for the second large North African town I’d seen that day.
“Donovan’s reserved you a room at Shepheard’s Hotel, in Cairo, which, all being well, is where he will meet you for lunch tomorrow. Lucky you. I wouldn’t mind a weekend at Shepheard’s myself.”
“Have you any idea how long we’re going to be there?”
“Donovan said at least four or five days.”
“I’ve an old girlfriend in Cairo. I wonder if I might be able to send her a telegram.”
“No problem. I can fix that for you.”
“I’d also like to get a message back to Washington.”
“A girl in every port, eh?”
“Actually this is a message to the Campus. I was hoping that someone there might be able to check out the circumstances of a death.” I told Poole about Ted Schmidt’s disappearance and his wife’s death in a traffic accident.
“All right. I’ll see what I can organize. All part of the service. So, what are your plans? Care to make a night of it? I’d be happy to show you the ruins. Couple of clubs I know.”
“I’d like to, really. But there’s a dinner tonight at La Mersa. Harry Hopkins’s son and the two Roosevelt boys and their fathers. It seems I’m invited.”
“That blowhard Elliott’s been talking about nothing else these past few days. ‘Idiot Roosevelt’ we call him. He’s been fucking some British WAC while his wing has been stationed here. That’s okay to do if you’re a nobody like me, and I’ve certainly had my moments since I got here. But you can’t expect to get away with that kind of thing when your pa is the president of the United States and you’ve got a wife and three kids back home.”
“Yeah, well, the sons of famous fathers. Listen, there’s one more favor you could do for me. Only I’m kind of behind with what’s been happening in Germany. I was wondering if you knew of a shortwave radio receiver I might listen to. In private. Preferably through a set of headphones-just in case anyone thinks I’m a German spy.”
“I can do better than that,” said Poole. “That is, if you don’t mind driving about ten miles into the desert.”
In Ridgeway Poole’s dusty-looking Peugeot 202 we drove north out of the city on the Bizerte Road, through military cemeteries and fields piled high with broken ordnance and ammunition dumps. Overhead, flights of the American Ninth Air Force rumbled through the sky like rusty dragonflies on their way to bomb targets in Italy.
Nearer Protville, which was our destination, Poole explained that he had lots of friends in the American First Antisubmarine Squadron, which was stationed in a building formerly occupied by the Luftwaffe. “They’ve got a German radio,” he said. “And it’s in perfect working order. A real beauty. The radio officer is a pal of mine from before the war. I don’t imagine he’ll mind you using it. Here we are.”
Poole pointed out four RAF Bristol Beaufighters and about ten USAAF B-24s. Operating as part of the Northwest African Coastal Air Force, it was the task of the B-24s to seek out and destroy enemy submarines between Sicily and Naples and west of Sardinia, and to fly escort for Allied shipping convoys. We found the squadron in a jubilant mood. One of the B-24s had shot down a long-range Focke Wulf 200 and, even now, a navy patrol was out searching the Gulf of Hammamet for the Germans who had bailed out.
“A 200,” I remarked, when Poole had finished making the introductions. “That’s a strange plane to be operating this far south.”
“You’re right,” said Lieutenant Spitz. “Mostly they operate as maritime patrol airplanes over Salerno, but this one must have strayed off course. Anyway, we’re pretty excited about it, what with the president coming here this afternoon.”
“The president’s coming here? I didn’t know.”
“FDR’s son, Elliott-his recon squad is stationed here. When you guys drove up we thought you were the advance party.”
Even as Spitz was speaking, a truck carrying more than a dozen MPs hove into view, and then another.
“This looks like them now,” said Poole.
“I’ll see that they don’t bother you,” said Spitz, and he showed us into a small white building where the radio room was housed, then left us with Sergeant Miller, the radio operator.
“We have a Tornister Empfanger B,” Miller said proudly. “And the ultimate German receiver, the E52b Koln. The frequency range is selected by the oblong control to the left of the indicator.” Miller plugged in some headphones and switched on the E52. “But it’s already tuned in to Radio Berlin, so all you gotta do is listen.” He handed me the phones.
I thanked him and sat down. Glancing at my watch, I put on the headphones, thinking I might just catch the next German news broadcast. Poole and Miller went outside to watch the deployment of MPs.
During the Atlantic voyage of the Iowa, the Washington Times-Herald had published the rumor that an international conference of major importance was about to be held in Cairo, and I wanted to find out if these rumors were being reported on German radio. I was hardly surprised to discover that they were, and in detail. Not only was Radio Berlin reporting that Churchill and Roosevelt planned to meet General Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo, but also that a conference of the Big Three, “to decide on military plans of great magnitude against Germany,” would take place at another location in the Middle East immediately afterward. On the face of it, I could hardly imagine that the Cairo conference could now proceed safely. And the Big Three conference now looked about as secret as a Hollywood divorce. Mike Reilly might as well have sent a press release to Hedda Hopper.
I kept on listening, hoping to learn more, turning up the volume as, for a moment, the signal from Radio Berlin seemed to fade away. Or at least, that was my intention. But somehow I managed to feed the German- speaking voice straight through the main loudspeaker. At almost full volume, it sounded like a speech at a Nuremberg party rally.
Panicking a little as I realized what I had done, I whipped off the headphones and tried to flick the switch that would cut the speaker. All I managed to do was find yet another pretuned German-language frequency. I jumped up and closed the open window quickly before trying, a second time, to switch off the radio. I was still examining the front of the Telefunken set when the door burst open and two U.S. Military Policemen stormed into the radio room and leveled their carbines at my head. I raised my hands instinctively.
“Turn it off,” yelled one of the policemen, a sergeant with a face of weathered brown brick.
“I don’t know how.”
The policeman worked the bolt on his carbine so that it was ready to fire. “Mister, you’ve got five seconds to turn it off or you’re a dead man.”
“I’m an American intelligence officer,” I yelled back at him. “It’s my fucking job to monitor German radio broadcasts.”
“And it’s my job to protect the president’s ass from German assassins,” said the sergeant. “So turn off the goddamn radio.”
I turned to face the radio, suddenly aware of the very real danger I was in. “Friendly fire” they called it, when your own side killed you. Which probably didn’t make it feel any better. I was about to experiment with another switch on the German radio when the MP said, “And don’t try to signal to anyone, either.”
I shook my head and, hardly certain of what I was doing, stood back from the radio, still keeping my hands
