coloring French attitudes was their deep-seated resentment toward the British for the Attack on Mers-el-Kébir in which the Royal Navy shelled the anchored French fleet in June 1940. Another issue was working with officials connected to the Vichy government which could cause serious political and security complications.<ref>Warrior among Diplomats, pp. 135–38</ref> Diplomat Robert D. Murphy, the U.S. consul general in Algiers, spearheaded efforts to gather pre-invasion intelligence and cultivate diplomatic contacts in French North Africa, and Wright would find himself intimately involved in his pre-invasion activities. North Africa, Sicily, and Italy Operation Flagpole On October 16, 1942, Captain Jerauld Wright was summoned to Operation Torch's staff headquarters at Horfolk House in London for an important meeting with General Eisenhower, alongside other senior officers. Eisenhower informed the group that the War Department had forwarded an urgent cable from U.S. diplomat Robert D. Murphy requesting the immediate dispatch of a top-secret high-level group to meet with Général Charles E. Mast, the military commander of Algiers and the leader of a group of pro-Allied officials in French North Africa. The objective of this secret mission, code-named Operation Flagpole, was to reach an agreement through Mast and his colleagues to have Général Henri Giraud, a key pro-Allied French army officer, step forward, take command of French military forces in North Africa, and then arrange a ceasefire with the Allied invasion force. Other alternatives, like Jean Darlan and Charles de Gaulle, had been rejected by the British and American governments for a variety of political reasons. Clark would be Eisenhower's personal representative, with Lemnitzer as the top invasion planner, Hamblen as the invasion's logistics expert, and Holmes serving as translator. Wright would serve as the liaison with the French Navy, with the specific objective of convincing the French to have their fleet anchored in Toulon join the Allied cause. The group flew in two Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers to Gibraltar, and on October 19, they boarded the British submarine , Lieutenant Norman Limbury Auchinleck "Bill" Jewell, RN, commanding. Seraph then transported Clark's party to the small fishing village of Cherchell, located 82 mils (132 kilometers) west of Algiers. After midnight on the evening of October 21, the Seraph surfaced and set Clark's mission ashore, where they met with Mast and Murphy. Wright met with Capitaine de vaisseau Jean Barjot and learned that the French Navy was opposed to U.S. entry into North Africa, although