Purely Preventive

The assassination of turncoat Admiral Jean Franc,ois Darlan, which gave the U.S. a chance to make a clean deal in North Africa, also gave French factionalists a chance to brew a political crisis. Two remarkably candid reports to the U.S. this week suggested that all was far from quiet beneath the top layer of General Henri Honore Giraud's government.

Broadcasting for CBS from Algiers, Charles Collingwood said that Giraud's arrest of twelve alleged co-conspirators in the Darlan case was part of a new struggle for power--"not only over North Africa but over the future of France."

"Every element of French politics is in it," Collingwood said, "the Conservatives, the Liberals, the Fascists, the Communists, the De Gaullists, the Republicans, the Royalists--and don't underestimate the Royalists. . . . They are not as farfetched or improbable or as old-world as you might think." (For a report on French Royalists, see TIME, Nov. 23.)

Nothing was released from North Africa on the identity or the political color of the twelve men arrested on Giraud's orders as a purely preventive measure. Some of them, Giraud admitted, were "personal friends." At least two others had aided the landing of U.S. invasion forces. Nipped, said the bony, conservative new High Commissioner, was a plot to assassinate him and Robert Murphy, new and equally conservative U.S. Minister in North Africa.

Puzzled by the "astonishing number of Axis sympathizers in North Africa," peripatetic Ernie Pyle reported to Scripps-Howard newspapers that the U.S. occupying forces were arresting only "the most out-&-out Axis agents" and allowing Fascist societies to continue operations.

While this week brought reports that General Giraud and Fighting France's General Charles de Gaulle might be able to get together, Reporter Pyle concluded: 1) the going will be "tough and probably long" before U.S. troops can move on "to bigger fronts"; 2) the French are "fundamentally behind us, but ... a strange illogical stratum is against us"; 3) "our fundamental policy still is one of soft-gloving the snakes in our midst."

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