The Secret Warriors

At 1605 hours 7 August 1942, a U.S. Navy C-46 long-range transport of the Naval Air Transport Command landed at Croydon Airfield, the usual terminus of flights originating in the United States.

Rather than taxiing to the terminal, the aircraft stopped some distance from the terminal buildings. Two senior officers, the London chief of station of the American OSS and Oscar Zigler of SHAEF counterintelligence, met the aircraft. Two passengers debarked, a naval officer and an American lieutenant colonel, presumably Edmund T. Stevens, the new number two man for the OSS in London. They entered an Austin Princess limousine assigned to the OSS and were driven to the Dorchester Hotel, accompanied by two unmarked American CIC cars.

The driver of a U.S. Army three-quarter-ton truck, plus a man in the uniform of a French Navy seaman, began unloading luggage and several wooden crates from the Navy aircraft. Four American officers then debarked from the aircraft, entered two more Ford CIC cars, and were driven, with the truck following, to the Dorchester Hotel.

Almost immediately, the aircraft was moved to a guarded hangar.

It has been impossible to penetrate the rooms the OSS maintains in the Dorchester Hotel, because that entire wing of the eighth floor is being guarded by both the British (who have a man riding the elevators and another stationed in the fire escape stairs) and by the American Army’s CIC.

It had been learned, however, that the largest of the three OSS suites had been reserved for an unidentified “senior personage.”

The next morning it was determined that the American Air Corps major is a man named Canidy, who was in charge of the safe house where Vice-Admiral de Verbey was interned in the United States.

Based on information previously received from our operative in the safe house in Deal, New Jersey, it is probable that the other three officers are Captain James M. B. Whittaker, an intimate of President Roosevelt; Lieutenant C. Holdsworth Martin III, formerly a French resident and a 1939 graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris; and Eric Fulmar, a German-American last known to be in Morocco. (There is a rather extensive dossier on Fulmar. In Morocco, he was intimately associated with Sidi Hassan el Ferruch, the pasha of Ksar es Souk. Although there is no intelligence previously connecting him with Vice-Admiral de Verbey, it seems logical to conclude that he is a longtime American agent.)

The dossier of C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., reveals that he is married to a French national and was general manager of LeFreque, S.A., the engineering firm, before the war. He and his wife have a long-standing personal relationship with Vice-Admiral de Verbey. Now residing in New York City, he is known to be associated with Colonel William Donovan of the OSS.

At 0810 8 August 1942, Canidy, Whittaker, Martin, and Fulmar left the Dorchester Hotel in an OSS automobile and were driven to the British SOE Station IX. At 1420, Canidy and Whittaker, in a vehicle assigned to SOE, were driven to Whitby House, Kent, which is the seat of the duchy of Stanfield, where they remained until 1915 hours 11 August 1942, when they returned to the Dorchester Hotel.

The estate has been turned into an OSS installation. A double barbed-wire fence has been erected by American troops, a battalion of which (Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel Innes) has been encamped on the estate since 3 August.

At 0615 hours 12 August, the naval personage and his immediate staff departed the Dorchester Hotel in the Austin Princess limousine of the OSS and were driven to Whitby House. An attempt is presently under way to penetrate Whitby House, or in some other manner confirm the identity of the naval personage.