The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, when most—but not all—Latin countries felt compelled to join the Allies, nations considered neutrality a hallowed status. It allowed them to maintain relations with a wide range of players. Washington was not necessarily a natural ally, not an automatic partner—many feared or resented the big northern neighbor, not least because of its history of gunboat diplomacy. Latins often looked more comfortably to Europe, and not only to Spain and Portugal as “mother” countries. They traded heartily with European countries, and they admired Germany for its industrial accomplishments and military professionalism, and France and Italy for their culture and art. England was a source of finance, of investments in infrastructure. Families who could afford to send their children abroad often preferred European countries, not America, for the higher education and experience that would serve them as future leaders at home.

  And why align with any of the contending powers? To protect commerce and diplomatic relations it was better to stay neutral. Besides, to some Latin Americans the European war was a conflict among empires, which Latin countries might wait out, far from the battlefields.

  Meanwhile, presence in “neutral” countries was vital for Axis spies. Admiral Canaris chose the Aztec capital for his agents’ Latin American headquarters because Germany wanted to keep close watch on the supply of oil and other primary materials for war industries Mexico could provide: mercury for explosives, manganese, sulfur, aluminum for airplane fuselages, iron, tungsten. And Mexico shared a porous border with the United States. As Washington weighed whether to join the war, Germany and Japan felt it was urgent to track the U.S. level of preparedness, its new technologies, the movement of its fleets.

  The Reich’s agents worked without much concern about arrest in the early Mexican years. Fascism ran against the purported values of the revolutionary government of President Lázaro Cárdenas, but neither Cárdenas nor members of his cabinet took a formal stand against it. There was no intensive effort to hunt down spies. When eyebrows were raised, police and authorities could easily be bribed. Besides, thanks to the boycott by U.S., British, and Dutch petroleum companies, the best customers for Mexican oil were Germany, Italy, and Japan, whose payments supported government programs. There was no reason to offend them unnecessarily.

  And Nazi spies could watch a theater of support in the streets. The Gold Shirts, a nationalist, anti-Semitic, anticommunist paramilitary group (Acción Revolucionaria Mexicana), demonstrated openly, sometimes violently, strutting with arms held in the fascist salute. Not to be outdone, the Italian community organized parades with goose-stepping teenagers in support of the Axis. Militants of the rightist National Union of Synarchists, a huge Catholic peasant movement against Cárdenas reforms such as secular education, maintained connections to Nazis and the Japanese. They marched with the same strong-arm salute. The Hitler Youth had branches at German schools and the German Center, which was also Nazi party headquarters. In the north where residents were sympathetic to Hitler, the swastika became a kind of design statement found on floors of houses, even on the floor of the nave of the cathedral of Tampico.

  A few of the Reich’s spies drove flashy cars, but otherwise they operated in the shadows. The high-profile exception: Hilda Kruger. The sweet-faced Hilda appeared in Mexican films with titles such as Adultery and He Who Died for Love. She showed up at fêtes and dinners on the arms of government officials and members of high society. One period photograph shows her singing informally but with apparent delight alongside Mario Moreno, the picaresque Mexican icon better known as Cantinflas.

  At a time when foreigners were obligated to report their movements outside the capital to the Ministry of the Interior, Hilda Kruger appeared to travel wherever she wished without red tape, her excursions approved by Aleman, the head of the ministry. At the U.S. Embassy, agents of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) were convinced that Hilda’s travels, facilitated by the “unscrupulous” Aleman, were related to the contraband of mercury and other precious war materials. So great was Hilda’s influence over the future president that, in a 1941 report on penetration of foreign spies in Mexico, the ONI considered kidnapping her and bringing her to the United States under custody.

  * * *

  The German spies were well connected, but sending their information safely to Berlin was a challenge. Ambassador von Collenberg sometimes enclosed dispatches to Germany securely in a diplomatic pouch. Radio transmissions were generally sent to Abwehr agents in Brazil, who bounced them to Europe. Agents crafted written messages with invisible ink, jotted into the corners or along the margins of seemingly innocuous letters, then mailed to a fictitious name at a designated drop in São Paulo, or in Lisbon, or a dozen other European cities.

  The ideal secret ink was made from something an agent might have around the house or in a suitcase. It should be readable with a simple developer and leave no odor or traces such as crystals that might be detected when a piece of paper was held up to the light. Typically in Latin America a German V-man made secret ink from Pyramidon tablets, a preparation of aminopyrine, a pain reliever like aspirin sold over the counter. Dissolved in alcohol, the tablets become a writing liquid whose messages emerge when the paper is treated with a solution including ferrous oxide—rust—and ordinary table salt. Another method included typing on paper covered with a thin film of wax. But with this method the agent had to be careful not to use periods or other punctuation marks that left a heavier imprint than letters, and could be more easily detected.

  In 1941, a revolutionary new way of sending written messages was developed by the Abwehr in Germany. By his own account, a dashing young agent named Duŝko Popov was the first to handle a secret message created by the new method. The claim is easy to believe because Popov, a wealthy Yugoslav business lawyer and bon vivant, was not quite like any other Abwehr spy.

  Blonde and athletic, with a winning smile, Popov was unapologetic about his high living, his taste for fine wines. If any spy were a model for James Bond, it was the debonair Duŝko Popov.

  With cover as a businessman in the import-export trade, Popov spied in London and traveled regularly to Lisbon, the neutral capital where every intelligence service had at least some agents and controllers. In 1941, at a villa on the Portuguese Riviera west of the capital, Popov’s Abwehr controller told him he was being assigned to the United States. He led him into a study where Popov saw an antique table, oiled black with age, on which a microscope gleamed in the afternoon light. “Have a look,” the controller said, slipping a glass slide from under the lens. “It’s the micropunkt.”

  It looked like a speck of dirt. It was really a small piece of film, the handler said, “and with a tiny drop of collodion”—a syrupy cellulose solution—“you stick it on anything you want. Any old scrap of paper, your luggage, on your skin if you want.” Then he called for champagne.

  Popov learned that an entire page of text could be reduced through a new microphotography technique to the size of the dot on a printed “i.” He could carry a volume the size of a Bible or a technical manual without detection. The dot could be read with any two-hundred-power microscope. Peering again as he sipped the champagne, Popov examined a long list of questions that he was supposed to answer for the Abwehr in America. They were all contained in the dot. Popov left the villa with a supply of secret ink and the micropunkt stuck to a personal letter, but he was not given the contraption to shrink pages into dots.

  A few months later, Popov made one of his frequent visits to the chief German spy in São Paulo, an electrical company executive named Albrecht Engels, code name “Alfredo.” Popov agreed to carry a seven-page questionnaire back to Engels’s subagent in the States. The document listed queries about U.S. firms that had been looking at South American uranium mines: how was the ore processed, how much did U.S. firms have in stock? At the time Popov had no idea about the race for the atomic bomb, so he had no idea why the questions were of interest.

  Popov did notice, however, that “Alfr
edo” had the microphotography apparatus, with which he reduced the sheaf of questions to the size of a few freckles. When Popov expressed envy, Engels volunteered to get him a machine from Berlin headquarters.

  The route of the promised machine gives an idea of the facility with which objects could move surreptitiously around the region. From Europe to South America was easy. In Brazil, “Alfredo” would have the machine hidden in a cotton bale for its journey to North America. The cotton exporter was in his pay, as were the Portuguese captain of a tramp steamer and a Canadian shipping agent. When Popov received a coded message, he was to travel to Quebec, check into a certain hotel and feign illness, and he would receive a visit from a bald-headed doctor. The doctor’s prescription would have instructions about where to pick up the machine. Carrying suitcases into the United States from Canada was not a problem.

  What “Alfredo” did not know was that Popov reported everything he found out to the FBI man in Rio. The raffish Duŝko Popov was a double agent who worked for the British MI5, a clandestine member of its “Double-Cross System.” The system handled men and women employed by the German secret services but who, taking great risk, delivered information to British Intelligence. “Double-Cross” agents also funneled disinformation back to the German services. Popov’s British controller had instructed him to work with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover when he was on assignment for the Abwehr in the United States.

  Popov shared the secret of the microdot with the FBI. After the war Hoover described the microdot’s “discovery” in self-serving style in Reader’s Digest, as if it had been captured by his agents. Hoover said they found the dot hidden on a “playboy” German agent, son of a millionaire businessman. He gave no credit to Popov, who was engaged in a dangerous game that could be fatal had the Germans uncovered it.

  Bold but suave, with the capacity to lie through his teeth, Duŝko Popov provided invaluable intelligence to the Americans and the British while keeping his Abwehr masters in the dark about his allegiance to the Allies. He was also a rake whose British code name—“Tricycle”—reportedly came from his proclivity for bedding two women at the same time. The straightlaced Hoover couldn’t stand him. He had “Tricycle” watched as closely as if he were the enemy.

  “If I bend over to smell a bowl of flowers, I scratch my nose on a microphone,” Popov complained to a British agent. Once when Popov took a lady friend to Florida, the Bureau threatened him with jail for violating the Mann Act, which forbids transporting a woman over state lines “for immoral purposes.”

  Whether Hoover’s judgment was clouded by his prejudice against Popov or whether other forces were at work, the Bureau chief appeared to ignore information from him that ought to have raised a red flag about Pearl Harbor. Popov’s German handlers had instructed him to go to Hawaii with the detailed questionnaire he carried on the first microdot he shared with the FBI. A third of the requests were “highest priority” items about Pearl Harbor on behest of the Japanese: sketches of airfields, water depths, condition of dry docks, positions of oil repositories, the status of dredging at the harbor, of new British and U.S. torpedo nets. Were they installed? Was Punchbowl—the crater of an extinct volcano in Honolulu—being used as an ammunition dump?

  Popov also shared that, on behalf of the Japanese, an Abwehr colleague had traveled to Taranto, Italy, site of one of the war’s most successful air raids. The Japanese wanted to know how the British destroyed almost all the Italian fleet in November 1940, using torpedo planes launched from a carrier. The Japanese interest in Hawaii and Taranto hinted, at least, at a possible attack at Pearl Harbor, headquarters of the U.S. Pacific fleet.

  The FBI chief, however, seemed more taken by the new technology—the microdot—than the implications of the questions it carried. Popov suggests that the information was “undervalued.”

  The British, who knew about the questions on the microdot, did not push Hoover. After the war, Sir John Masterman, the British chairman of the committee that ran the Double-Cross System, confirmed that “Tricycle’s questionnaire … contained a somber but unregarded warning of the subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor.” It had been up to the Americans, he said, “to make their appreciation and to draw their deductions from the questionnaire rather than for us to do so.”

  Did the British hold back because they wanted the Americans to enter the war with them? Or was distrust on Hoover’s part at the bottom of the missed signal? The British and U.S. intelligence communities were still cautious of each other, far from the close collaborators they became after the war. And Hoover, despite assurances from the British, deeply mistrusted the messenger, Popov. He called the Yugoslavian Serb a “Balkan playboy.”

  Unable to work successfully with the FBI, Popov pleaded with his MI5 handlers to allow him to return to Europe. He convinced the Abwehr that their U.S. mission for him had been ill-conceived. The Germans sent him back to London, unaware until the war’s end that he was a double agent for the British.

  European agents in Latin America for both sides worried about their families and friends close to the battle lines. In Europe Popov discovered that his parents had escaped from Dubrovnik by boat as the Croatian Ustashi movement, newly installed as a Nazi puppet government, launched a reign of terror against nationalists and Serbs. Popov’s uncle and two cousins were not as lucky. They were hanged from a tree in the courtyard of their house.

  * * *

  Roosevelt wanted to openly help beleaguered Great Britain, but the public was not with him. The powerful “America First” movement and others militated against declaring war; some were pro-Nazi, others isolationist or with other reasons to stay above the fray. They included some of the wealthiest and most influential figures in the country, such as aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. Some polls said as much as 80 percent of the population was against the war. Formally joining the Allies would be Roosevelt’s political suicide. Nevertheless, Americans remained suspicious about German designs on Latin countries.

  On October 27, 1941, Navy Day, the president came up with a trump card to change all but the hardest minds about declaring war. “I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government by the planners of the New World Order,” he told a national radio audience.

  The map showed the South American continent and part of Central America carved into four large vassal states to be administered by Germany at some undetermined date. “That map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well,” said the president.

  The secret map was supposed to have been snagged from a German courier in Argentina by a British intelligence operative. At the BSC office in New York, “Intrepid” gave it to his friend Bill Donovan, a White House advisor who would found the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and Donovan shared it with the president. Roosevelt refused to display the document to the press, insisting only that it came from “a source which is undoubtedly reliable.”

  Later the map did become available. The fiefdoms even had names: Brasilien, Argentinien, Neuspanien, and Chile. In the margins were handwritten questions in German about fuel supplies for air routes, about airlines that went to Panama and Mexico.

  Over the years researchers suggested that the “secret map” was a fabrication by the British Security Co-ordination to help Roosevelt achieve a mandate to enter the war. Neither Roosevelt, Stephenson, nor Donovan ever admitted deception. At any rate, a month later the chilling document was forgotten with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The decision to join the Allies was made for the United States not by Hitler or Churchill, but by Japan.

  Hardly had the smoke cleared over Pearl Harbor than the Mexico-based chief Abwehr agent Georg Nicolaus was sending information to Berlin that was startling in its accuracy. A local Japanese intelligence agent working with a U.S. informer, who has never been named, needed help from Nicolaus to send out intelligence—the Japanese agent was being watched too closely after the attack to send it himself. Thus Nicolaus was able
to send two letters to Berlin carrying microdots that reported nothing less than the shape of the upcoming U.S. Navy offensive in the South Pacific and northern Japan, “lightning-like” aircraft carrier raids. He reported the U.S. losses on December 7 and the number of aircraft available to U.S. volunteer pilots in Burma and China. He reported the names of a carrier and certain battleships then transiting the Panama Canal and headed for the Pacific.

  THE SPYMASTERS

  With the United States’ entry into the war, the contest between Hoover and Canaris became more acute. They brought vastly different life experiences to the fight. Each was a second son born on a New Year’s Day, Hoover in 1895, Canaris in 1887, but there the resemblance ended.

  J. Edgar Hoover looked hefty, always dressed nattily, and lived with his mother in the house where he was born until she passed away when he was forty-three. Wilhelm Canaris was short and rather plain, had a wife and family, and is reputed to have counted among his lovers the spy and courtesan Mata Hari. Canaris was Catholic, Hoover a Presbyterian who “liked to find a few minutes each day … to meditate and pray.”

  The contrast extended to the way they worked. Hoover was a desk man who didn’t travel, while Canaris knew the world, as experienced in the field as any of his spies. Hoover kept to his routine like clockwork, walking to work in the morning, lunching daily with FBI associate director Clyde Tolson, his lifelong friend. Canaris had a reputation in his early years of disappearing for spy assignments and being good at disguises.

  Despite their differences, Hoover and Canaris had a compelling attribute in common. They were both deeply patriotic.