Across the ocean George Meany, the powerful boss of the American Federation of Labour, had protested to Mollet about the arrest of Algerian trade union leaders in 1956 and, it was reported, asked that Lacoste be disavowed in the name of socialism. … Herb Greer, an American journalist who made two clandestine visits to the F.L.N., had already had films taken by him televised across America. As well as telling harrowing tales of French brutality, he revealed to the American public disquieting instances of Algerian mistrust. One djoundi in the field is quoted as saying: “I don’t trust America and I don’t know any Arab who does…. You want to be friends with France and so you give them guns and helicopters to fight against us. But you’re also afraid we might win, so just in case you express sympathy, unofficially of course….” Repeatedly Greer encountered suspicion that the Americans were after Algerian oil. Similar plaints were later recorded by Richard and Joan Brace: “on the one hand the United States helps us through the U.N. with wheat and food, and on the other furnishes her ally, France, with the finest military hardware—helicopters, napalm, everything, to kill us off. Which way do the Americans want us, dead or alive?”

XREF: Parallels Cold War dynamics where the U.S. hedged between colonial allies and independence movements, similar to later Arab-Israeli and Vietnam policy tensions.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 761