Nineteen months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt sent twelve "vice consuls" to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia on a classified assignment. Their objective? To prepare the groundwork for what eventually became Operation TORCH - the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa that repelled the Nazis and also enabled the liberation of Italy.The twelve Americans included an ex-Cartier jewel salesman and wine merchant from a patrician family; a madcap Harvard anthropologist; a Coca-Cola salesman and Paris playboy who ran with Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation crowd; a rather Elizabethan adventurer-cum-interpreter; a construction expert; a distinguished lawyer; some American ex-French Foreign Legionnaires and Paris bankers; and an Annapolis graduate and hero of WWI. These vice consuls were soon caught up in a web of espionage and treachery that included double-dealing mistresses, Gaullist and Vichy agents, and a homicidal French monk.Based on recently declassified foreign records, as well as the memoirs of Ridgeway Brewster Knight (one of the twelve "apostles"), FDR'S 12 Apostles is a fascinating account of international intrigue.Set in exotic locales from Paris to Casablanca to Tangier, the story takes us through the pivotal TORCH invasion and the eventual assassination of Vichy French leader Francois Darlan. Hal Vaughan's fast-paced narrative is a potent cocktail of heroic acts and bizarre twists and turns - involving Christians, Muslims, and Jews - in an arena of conspiracy and backstabbing. Hal Vaughan provides the first true look at the intricate and covert planning that planted the seeds of victory in the Mediterranean Theater.

This explosive narrative reveals for the first time the shocking hidden years of Coco Chanel's life: her collaboration with the Nazis in Paris, her affair with a master spy, and her work for the German military intelligence service and Himmler's SS.
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was the high priestess of couture who created the look of the modern woman. By the 1920s she had amassed a fortune and went on to create an empire. But her life from 1941 to 1954 has long been shrouded in rumor and mystery, never clarified by Chanel or her many biographers. Hal Vaughan exposes the truth of her wartime collaboration and her long affair with the playboy Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage--who ran a spy ring and reported directly to Goebbels. Vaughan pieces together how Chanel became a Nazi agent, how she escaped arrest after the war and joined her lover in exile in Switzerland, and how--despite suspicions about her past--she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and rebuild the iconic House of Chanel.

Maine-born Dr. Sumner "Jack" Jackson joined the British Army as a volunteer physician during World War I. After the Battle of the Somme, he married a beautiful French Red Cross nurse. When the war was over, Jackson joined the staff of the American Hospital in Paris, where he quickly became a favorite physician of such Lost Generation figures as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. During World War II, Jackson, his wife, and their teenage son joined the French Resistance. They hid and treated wounded Allied flyers and Resistance fighters, used the hospital as a cover for Resistance activities, photographed the German submarine base at Saint-Nazaire, and helped smuggle plans for the V-1 rocket to England. Just before the Americans liberated Paris, however, the family was betrayed to the Gestapo and deported to German concentration camps. The day before the war ended, tragedy struck. Doctor to the Resistance is based on recently declassified records of the French Resistance, the National Archives, family letters and diaries, and the author's interviews with Dr. Jackson's son. Hal Vaughan recounts the Jacksons' remarkable true story for the first time. It will captivate history buffs, World War II aficionados, and anyone interested in the Paris of that fascinating era.

The true heroic story of an American Surgeon and his family in Occupied Paris. Dr. Sumner "Jack" Jackson joined the British Army as a volunteer physician during World War I. After the Battle of the Somme, he married a French Red Cross nurse. When the war was over, Jackson joined the staff of the American Hospital in Paris, where he quickly became a favorite physician of such Lost Generation figures as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. During World War II, Jackson, his wife and their teenage son joined the French Resistance. They hid and treated wounded Allied flyers and Resistance fighters, used the hospital as a cover for Resistance activities and helped smuggle plans for the V-1 rocket to England. Just before the liberation of Paris, the family was betrayed to the Gestapo and deported to German concentration camps. The day before the war ended, tragedy struck...This book features include: Thrills with as much drama and suspense as any novel of film! Contains gripping photographs of a heroic family, one of the allies they rescued, and the Gestapo officers they fought; and a hardback edition published in November 2004.