The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  Canaris determined to work around the SD, to insulate the Abwehr from the most savage Nazi methods. He wanted his agency to expand, to be an instrument that maintained independent thought and action, a strong part of the future Germany. In Latin America as elsewhere, he instructed his men to evade orders from outside that involved brutality.

  PATROLLING THE ETHER

  Operation Bolívar in Brazil was finally crippled by the covert work of a largely unsung band of civilian specialists and aficionados led by an unassuming middle-aged man who had lived and breathed radio since his adolescence. On an island in Maine in 1908, when he was just fourteen, George Sterling became enamored with wireless radio. He served under General Pershing on the Mexican border, and in World War I in France, again under Pershing, Sterling organized and operated the first radio intelligence section of the Signal Corps. He located enemy transmitters and captured their messages. In civilian life again, Sterling worked for the government on the edge of the underworld. He located racetrack touts who wore small hidden transmitters and tried to beat bookies by placing bets just as winners came in.

  During Prohibition, Sterling later wrote, he accumulated what he called “good target practice” for ferreting out Nazi spies. He helped find bootleggers who employed clandestine stations to communicate with boats inbound with contraband booze.

  In 1940, with war coming, Sterling created the FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division (RID), marshaling expert radiomen and ham operators for the cause. Sterling agreed to a liaison and exchange of information with the RID’s British counterpart, the Radio Security Service. For Sterling, the RID’s “most active and critical theater of espionage” was Latin America.

  By 1942, the RID had sent teams to a dozen countries, although the level of cooperation its operatives received from local governments varied widely, from ready help in Brazil to folded arms in Chile. Nevertheless, primary RID stations were well equipped with receiving and recording equipment and large direction finders, special rotating antennae sensitive to the direction of shortwave signals bouncing off the ionosphere. Mobile units, disguised as delivery vans, could crawl around neighborhoods or travel into the countryside, equipped with a simple loop antenna capable of picking up the ground-wave component of a signal within a few miles. For homing in on transmitters in very close quarters, a risk that operatives sometimes took, they developed what they called a “snifter,” a signal-strength meter that a man could carry in the palm of his hand while inspecting a building to determine which room a signal came from. Listening around the clock, the RID men came to distinguish the distinctive “fists” of various spies sending messages—experts will tell you no two operators transmit Morse code with exactly the same touch and rhythm.

  In March 1942, RID agents detected a station in Rio encoding its message based on a book—a commonly used technique—whose title they discovered from an accidentally undisguised transmission: The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe. Cryptanalysts determined—without computers—the indicated pages, lines, and letter substitutions being used to make out a chilling message:

  QUEEN MARY REPORTED OFF RECIFE BY STEAMSHIP CAMPEIRO ON ELEVENTH AT EIGHTEEN O’CLOCK MIDDLE EUROPEAN TIME.

  The legendary liner had been repurposed as a troop carrier and was carrying ten thousand American and Canadian men. Other Operation Bolívar transmitters were full of the news, and the radiomen tracked down their locations. The liner was diverted, and the biggest spy sweep of the war in Latin America netted two hundred operatives and informants, arrested by Brazilian police.

  Even after the war when RID’s activities became public, J. Edgar Hoover gave the radio counterespionage agents no credit for arrests like these and more, which he attributed only to the FBI. Hoover held a grudge against FCC chairman James Lawrence Fly, who long blocked the FBI’s wiretap power, and anyway, sharing credit was not the FBI chief’s style.

  More British and U.S. covert operatives arrived in countries that joined the Allies. They mixed unknowingly with the Reich’s agents, and with local informants who often saw little reason to abandon their allegiance to old contacts and networks, and continued to collect information for Germany. In Brazil, Allied and Axis spies and counterspies might pass as enemies unrecognized amid the dark buildings of the capital’s historic center or stroll the same breezy seafront from Ipanema to Copacabana.

  THE “MASTER SPY” OF THE AMERICAS

  Ironically, for all the damage done by agents who helped U-boats and other Axis vessels target Allied ships, the only German operative ever executed for spying in Latin America could never get his radio to work properly. Agent A-3779, Heinz August Lüning, had been trained in the Hamburg Abwehr spy school to make invisible inks, but once in the field he often couldn’t get the formulas right, whether using lemon juice, urine, or headache tablets. He had thought he was escaping the worst—being drafted into Hitler’s army—by becoming a spy and going to Cuba. He went in the guise of a Jewish refugee, traveling on a Honduran passport.

  Lüning’s time in Havana coincided with the Battle of the Caribbean, a spectacular serial disaster for Allied shipping. In just ten months, from February to November 1942, German submarines from the South Atlantic to the Caribbean sank 609 Allied vessels—about two a day, or 17.5 percent of Allied merchant tonnage lost between 1939 and 1945 on all seas to all forms of attack (German losses: 22 subs).

  In the Caribbean and the Atlantic, north and south, the sixteen-hundred-ton German Milchkühe, the Nazi “milk cow” submarines, seemed to be everywhere. The refueling and reprovisioning subs allowed the combat subs to stay constantly on the hunt without returning to European bases. U.S. defenses—trained personnel, appropriate planes and vessels, effective detection equipment—were not yet up to speed.

  In the fall of 1942, things looked bad all around for the Allies. Nazi forces controlled most of North Africa and were pummeling Stalingrad; the Japanese were fighting for control of the South Pacific at Guadalcanal, Port Moresby, Northern Australia. U-boats virtually controlled the Caribbean; half the ships they sunk were oil tankers. If sea lanes could not be protected, the United States and Great Britain could not count on the flow of fuel, or of other raw materials like bauxite (aluminum ore), or meat, or provisions essential to soldiers’ rations like sugar and coffee.

  Cuba’s size and location made the island ground zero in the fight against the U-boats. Both the British and Americans had plenty of spies in place. Even Ernest Hemingway supervised, blunderingly, a private counterintelligence network of Spanish Republican refugees. But losses in nearby seas were deemed to be proof of the effectiveness of Nazi spies in Cuba. Unfortunately for the inept Lüning, he was the spy who was caught.

  Lüning, code name “Lumann,” was tagged by a compromising letter spotted at the British Imperial Censorship station in Bermuda, where twelve hundred trained staff scrutinized sea and air mail between Europe and Latin America. Some of the Reich’s most deft espionage agents were discovered by the sharp women at the Bermuda station. The spies often never realized it, or only figured it out later when their operations, tracked by the British or the Americans, went wildly awry.

  Heinz Lüning, however, was by all accounts an incompetent spy. The author Graham Greene, working for MI6 on the Portugal desk that kept tabs on the Abwehr in the Western Hemisphere, shared supervision of Lüning’s case. Greene was said to have used “Lumann” as a model for the character of James Wormald, the vacuum-cleaner salesman and notional espionage agent in Our Man in Havana.

  There was nothing funny about Lüning’s fate, however. At his trial, his radio was shown to be inoperable, and there was no proof he had ever sent out an important piece of intelligence. His story made the pages of True Detective magazine, which ran photos of Hoover in Washington, D.C., looking at a map alongside the Cuban chief of police, Manuel Benitez, the vain, self-serving former immigration official who had sold thousands of invalid landing permits to Jews. Other photos showed Lüning at an open jail cell door with his arm at his waist l
ike a clothing model, as if trying to look his best. Benitez invented “subagents” supposedly controlled by Lüning throughout the Americas. U.S. agents called him a “master spy.”

  All this was fine with the Abwehr, because Lüning’s arrest diverted attention from more capable agents in the German network. The capture cast a favorable glow on Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and his lackey Benitez, who were invited to Washington together. There in front of photographers’ flashing bulbs, J. Edgar Hoover shared the glory of capturing the “master spy” of the Americas. Lüning wrote a letter to his wife, son, parents, and an aunt and an uncle saying that the Cubans treated him well in jail, that “I never liked this job,” and condemning the Abwehr for “bad preparation and a very bad organization.” He sent kisses and an admonition to “hold your head high.” On the morning of November 25, 1942, Heinz Lüning refused a blindfold and was shot to death by a Cuban firing squad. Lüning’s demise did nothing to end the attacks on Allied ships, which continued until early 1944 when improved antisubmarine warfare drove the U-boats and Italian subs from the Caribbean.

  ENDGAME

  SIS agents, numbering some seven hundred open and covert G-men over the course of the war, continued to investigate leads about suspicious businessmen and community leaders, arranging with local police for their deportation to Europe and Japan or to the concentration camps for captured “aliens” in the United States. During the war, diplomats in Latin countries often took an open attitude toward the peaceful movements of labor, student, and other civil society movements that were organizing for more democracy, but Hoover was suspicious of them. Viscerally anticommunist, he ordered surveillance of the groups and infiltrated their meetings, especially after 1943 when the Nazi espionage “threat” seemed contained. The FBI agents trained secret police. They established relationships with police and investigative agencies that would be continued decades hence by U.S. diplomats and covert operators to uproot undesirable Latin governments and leftist forces. The OSS, soon to become the CIA, continued to build up intelligence on the region.

  Despite blows, Operation Bolívar persisted beyond 1942, vindicating the approach Canaris had insisted upon from the beginning: cast a wide net of many agents in many cells, operating independently of each other, so that the entire weave is less likely to come undone when a string or two is pulled out. The Reich’s agents remaining in Brazil kept their heads down. They no longer met casually over cortados at the Sympathy Café in Rio and could not recur for funds to the German Embassy, closed after Brazil declared war against the Axis in June 1942.

  But information continued to flow by way of Buenos Aires. SS captain Johannes Siegfried Becker, the genius SD spy who had expanded “Alfredo’s” operation into a first-class espionage station, was in Europe when the Brazil crackdown occurred; now he returned to Argentina where the German Embassy remained open. Antifascist Argentines reported suspicious activity to authorities, but their efforts were to little avail.

  “All our family and friends sympathized whole-heartedly with the Allies and with Russia, desiring the defeat of the Axis, and we cheered the victories of the Red Army,” Ernesto Guevara Lynch wrote in a memoir. In the early 1940s, Guevara Lynch had owned a plantation for growing yerba mate for the ubiquitous hot Argentine drink and made common cause with other antifascist young men. They spied on Graf Spee crewmen settled by the government in Cordoba, four hundred miles north of Buenos Aires. They saw the crew holding military exercises with dummy rifles.

  They submitted a report about the Germans and other suspicious sightings—a truck loaded with arms, a hotel with a radio transmitter—to Acción Argentina, a nationwide organization that promoted entry into the war on the Allied side. But the organization was proscribed in 1943, and such citizen spy reports came to naught. Ernesto Guevara Lynch did become a part of history as the father of guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. When Che was a boy, wrote his father, the future revolutionary icon “was always asking me to let him help” with the spy operations.

  Anti-Nazi Argentine congressmen, too, tried to weed out spies with reports, and their efforts resulted in some arrests. But much of the old network stayed in place. The government, Guevara Lynch said, “did not hide its sympathies for Hitler and Mussolini.”

  * * *

  After the war, J. Edgar Hoover went on to fight “the enemy within”: communists, civil rights advocates, and antiwar protesters in the United States. In 1947, Donovan’s OSS became the CIA, the intelligence agency assigned to cover the rest of the world, now including Latin America.

  William Donovan won the larger fight with Hoover over international espionage, but he lost a personal battle to head the postwar agency. What Wild Bill did not understand, but Hoover did, was how to manipulate Washington and the public. “Donovan knows everything we know except what we know about Donovan,” an unnamed FBI source told a columnist for Colliers magazine in late 1941. Donovan’s appeal to Roosevelt didn’t help. “No President dare touch John Edgar Hoover,” Donovan told an OSS colleague. “Let alone congressmen. They are all scared pink of him.”

  In late 1944, Donovan’s “Top Secret” plan for the new global intelligence agency was leaked to a reporter who was a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover. Subsequent headlines warned of a “SUPER GESTAPO AGENCY,” and the plan was shelved. Allen Dulles, Donovan’s former OSS chief in Berne, became head of the CIA. J. Edgar Hoover led the FBI until his death at age seventy-seven in 1972.

  Wilhelm Canaris, the Reich’s legendary spymaster, did not survive the war. Like Hoover, Canaris was anticommunist to the core, ever since he had witnessed the mayhem of a Marxist-inspired revolt among shipmen of his beloved Imperial Navy at the end of World War I. And he had long held the trust of Hitler, holding seventeen private meetings with him, for instance, in 1934 and 1935. Canaris effectively performed secret intelligence missions on his own—even the British Admiralty lost track of him between 1935 and 1939. In Spain, where he operated in disguise, he barely escaped with his life. In Japan he overrode Versailles prohibitions by setting up a secret program in Osaka to build submarines for Germany. His loyalty to the fatherland was beyond doubt.

  Canaris had been aghast, however, to hear that the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the party, was torching villages without military justification during the German invasion of Poland in 1939, killing intellectuals, Jews, priests, members of the aristocracy, and political leaders. He went to the front to see for himself, demanding on his return the carnage stop, but General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the General Staff, effectively told him to return to the Abwehr. “A day will come when the world will find the Wehrmacht responsible for these methods,” Canaris warned.

  Wilhelm Canaris was a well-traveled, well-read man of the world who could coolly assess the strengths of various belligerents, even when the Wehrmacht seemed unstoppable. He believed it was a mistake to go to war against Britain. Perhaps recalling his early experience on the decks of the Dresden where he watched the young U.S. fleet show its colors and energy in New York Harbor, he intuited that it was also a mistake to go to war against America. Canaris wanted his homeland and its opponents intact when the fighting ended. He secretly, and vainly, approached the British in various ways to make a diplomatic bridge that might serve both sides and save his country from ruin.

  When Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca in 1943 and declared they would accept only “unconditional surrender” of the Axis, Canaris lost hope in negotiations. “I believe the other side have now disarmed us of the last weapon with which we could have ended the war,” he told a friend. No German general would accept “unconditional” defeat. Goebbels riled up the population in the press and over the airwaves after Casablanca, describing horrifying conditions that would come with total surrender.

  “The students of history will not need to trouble their heads after this war as they did after the last to determine who was guilty of starting it,” Canaris said. “The case is however different when we consider guilt for prolongi
ng the war.”

  Among some of the most patriotic German officers, including Canaris, Hitler’s terror tactics, mass murders of Jews, and patronage of a secret police state eventually outweighed his role for them as a bastion against Bolshevism. Canaris joined the conspiracy to assassinate the Fuehrer, a desperate attempt to seize the armed forces from Nazi control and bring forward a peace agreement with the Allies.

  On July 20, 1944, in his Wolf’s Lair, Hitler escaped the bomb meant to kill him. Canaris was arrested three days later in Berlin and brought to Flossenberg concentration camp in Bavaria. For months he underwent questioning, and when he did not provide answers or his answers were found to be elaborate ruses that implicated no one and arrived at dead ends, he was tortured.

  On April 8, 1945, Canaris tapped a message in code to the former director of Danish intelligence, who was being held in the next cell: “Badly mishandled. Nose broken at last interrogation. My time is up. Was not a traitor. Did my duty as a German. If you survive, please tell my wife.” With four other conspirators, including the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Canaris was stripped naked and hanged the next day. Two weeks later the camp was liberated by U.S. troops.

  PART IV

  The Warriors

  11.

  THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC: SOUTHERN SEAS

  Long, low, gray, and bristling with gun turrets and antennae, a Panzerschiff lay off the coast of Brazil in September 1939, hidden by the vastness of the Atlantic, waiting for orders. One of three Kriegsmarine Deutschland–class cruisers, the Panzerschiff (armored ship) carried over a thousand men and weighed 10,600 tons, more than the weight limit imposed upon German military vessels by the Treaty of Versailles. When the British looked at plans for the “cruisers,” they judged they were not cruisers at all, and gave the Panzerschiffe the nickname by which they became most widely known: pocket battleships.