We Killed Darlan: Algiers 1942 A Personal Account of the French Resistance in North Africa,

Douglas W. Alden was an Intelligence officer with the 8th Air Force in World War II, part of the U.S. Army's newly created OSS Office of Strategic Services, a critical part of U.S. clandestine efforts during the war and a forerunner of the CIA.

In 1944, the OSS had parachuted 120 French officers into France to report on German troop movements on and after D-Day. Douglas Alden was a briefing officer in that operation, and one of the last men parachuted in was Mario Faivre.

Earlier, in 1942, Faivre had played a leading role in a wartime adventure with the French Resistance, during the American invasion of North Africa the assassination of Admiral Franois Darlan, supreme commander of the French navy, who after the war was decreed to have been "acting against the interests of France."

In 1975, Faivre's book about the plot to assassinate Admiral Darlan was published in France. Fifty years later, Douglas Alden, by then a scholar of French literature, read Faivre's story, Nous avons tu Darlan, and "felt compelled" to translate the dramatic day-by-day account. He says, "I could not put the book down."

Faivre's tale had noted that the 100,000-some men of the French Army of North Africa, though deeply divided on many issues, agreed on "their disgust with Darlan."

". . . We knew that the sailors of the Admiralty had a connection by secret cable with Vichy and that by this channel Darlan exchanged messages with Vichy in which . . . he was acting as an accomplice."

"This is definitely history," Douglas Alden wrote, "but is better than history since it reads very much like fiction. . . . Mario's account raises a number of issues that will seem controversial to Americans."

The objective of Generals David Eisenhower and Mark Clark at this time was to bring the French Army in North Africa over to the American side and Darlan's apparent position of collaboration with the Germans was key to the process. The arguments . . . the threats . . . the behind-the-scenes operations were all a part of the intrigue. General Clark's memoirs called the Admiral's death "an act of Providence. . . . His removal from the scene was like the lancing of a troublesome boil."