The Tango War Read online

  Ford professed not to give a good damn about his Academy Awards. But if you mentioned that he won four Oscars, forgetting the two he won for Navy documentaries, he would snap: “Six.”

  —JOSEPH MCBRIDE AND MICHAEL WILMINGTON, John Ford

  Donovan’s partner in the film operations was John Ford, the Hollywood director who won six Oscars and became famous for iconic dramas that explored the roles of war and history in the lives of unforgettable individuals—The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Searchers, Stagecoach, They Were Expendable. Donovan didn’t drink and Ford did, but otherwise they were kindred spirits, friends before the war. They shared a special, mystical bond of Irish Catholicism, and both were unquestionably brave—on assignment for Donovan, Ford shot with a handheld camera under Japanese attack at Midway, at the invasion of Sicily, and at Normandy.

  Both Donovan and Ford were independent thinkers who respected a chain of command but liked to keep it simple. Ford had created a wartime Field Photographic Unit with top-notch professionals, newly inducted in the services, and he was glad to incorporate the unit into Donovan’s OSS operation because the chain could not have been simpler: Ford to Donovan to Roosevelt.

  Since the time he was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve in the mid-1930s, Ford had sailed along the Mexican and Central American Pacific coast on his beloved 110-foot ketch Araner, named for the Irish Aran Islands, his mother’s home. Ford explored as far south as Panama. U.S. officers knew that Japan, starved of resources for its militarism in Asia by a Western embargo, was likely to be planning war to ensure access to what it needed. An invasion of North America was possible, and Ford’s commander in the Reserve encouraged his reports.

  While an onlooker might see only a wealthy yachtsman at leisure, the Hollywood director surreptitiously gathered intelligence and mapped waters. He said a certain lagoon was “close enough to shipping lanes to serve as an ideal place to either stockpile supplies or to serve as a rendezvous point for submarines and sub-tenders.” He recorded photography conditions and camouflage issues at La Paz, Mazatlan, the Tres Marias Islands, and Panama. He brought his knowledge to Donovan’s outfit.

  John Ford’s spy journeys were made at his own expense, and in Baja sometimes under cover of a glamorous boys’ lark of Hollywood stars. While John Wayne, Ward Bond, and Henry Fonda recovered aboard the luxurious Araner from wild booze fests in coastal bars, Ford compiled copious, detailed notes about what he had seen on shore. He wrote about Japanese “tourists” with Leica cameras fitted with telephoto lenses, shooting excessive numbers of pictures of bridges and oil storage tanks. Men supposedly on liberty from Japanese shrimp boats were too sharply dressed to be fishermen, “in well tailored flannels, worsted and tweed … black service shoes smartly polished.”

  “It is plausible that these men know every Bay, Cove and Inlet in the Gulf of California, a Bay which is so full of islands, and so close to our Arizona borderline they constitute a real menace,” Ford reported.

  In a psychological operation to stir regional pride and impress reluctant potential allies, Ford made a five-reel picture showing Mexico on a war footing and shorter films aimed at Latin American audiences. “Be sure the Mexican flag is carried at full gallop,” he wrote in instructions to the crew. “Show their air fields carefully. Line up their planes to look smart, efficient and in great number.”

  * * *

  After the United States entered the war, the German espionage advantage slipped, not so much due to the expertise of the SIS—although the FBI agents got better at the job every day—but due to the Germans’ own mistakes, and some bad luck.

  Getting money from Berlin to its Latin American spies was never easy, a handicap that would plague the German networks until the end of the war. One attempt to fund Georg Nicolaus and his Abwehr circle through Mussolini failed in part thanks to an early example of cooperation between J. Edgar Hoover and the BSC’s William Stephenson. Unable to send funds directly to Mexico and Brazil, Canaris asked his ally Il Duce to remove US$3.85 million in small bills from the Italian Embassy bank account in Washington and send it south with couriers. In October 1940, two consuls and an Italian Embassy secretary carried the money in diplomatic pouches as far as Brownsville. From there two of the Italians traveled to New Orleans to take a boat for Pernambuco, Brazil, while the other headed by train for Mexico City. Hoover’s men, who got wind of the transfer and contacted the BSC, kept the Italians under surveillance until they reached the border, while Stephenson’s men made elaborate provisions to cover the arrival points.

  Unfortunately for the Allies, the Italians’ ship bypassed Pernambuco where the British spies had been waiting and steamed on to Rio, where Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas promised the Italian ambassador he would protect the delivery. At the Mexico City train station, however, the hugely surprised Italian courier had his belongings searched. This of course violated the basic tenets of diplomatic privilege, and in the face of the Italian ambassador’s righteous umbrage, the Mexican government politely apologized for the stupid and unfortunate act of “a new and inexperienced clerk.” But the money, US$1.4 million, went into a blocked account so the Germans couldn’t touch it.

  The toughest blow to the Abwehr in Mexico came from inside when local spy chief Georg Nicolaus metaphorically shot himself in the foot, bringing down much of the network with him. Nicolaus had taken a lover, who was also the caretaker of the swank apartment house where he lived. Early in 1942, news arrived that Nicolaus’s wife was coming from Germany, and his mistress would have to take a backseat, at least for a while. His lover wasn’t having it, and became angry. She took the information she had on him to the Mexican police, who arrested Nicolaus. Most of his agents were discovered.

  When U-boats torpedoed two Mexican tankers in May 1942, Mexico declared war and German agents became the enemy. By this time Mexico had stopped selling oil to the Axis; the FBI had been advising Mexican police about the spies it had been tracking, and now local detectives began arrests of men like Baron von Schlebrügge and Weisblat, the elegant spy with Polish roots who posed as a shipbuilder. Georg Nicolaus was delivered to U.S authorities and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Bismarck, North Dakota. Mexico repatriated other agents on the SIS spy list to Germany. Except for one.

  Hilda Kruger had precipitously married a grandson of former president Porfirio Díaz, a union reportedly arranged by Aleman. She offered gala fiestas at her new husband’s hacienda outside the capital, protected as she was from repatriation and from delivery to the United States. Mexican investigators could not or would not prove espionage charges against her. Unpredictably, Kruger became involved with intellectuals at the National University of Mexico, where she studied Mexican culture and wrote a biography of La Malinche, the intelligent and beautiful indigenous translator who was also the lover of the Spanish conqueror of the Aztecs, Hernán Cortés. Kruger married twice more, first a wealthy Venezuelan sugar king, then a Russian industrialist. She lived her last years in a luxury apartment in New York City, facing Central Park.

  Hoover may have won the duel in Mexico, but Canaris was far from fatally wounded. As the war progressed and the Battle of the Atlantic began, German spy activity shifted from political and industry espionage to include the much more deadly intelligence gathering on the movement of ships in the Caribbean and South America. Canaris was there with a strong network in place, ready for action.

  10.

  OPERATION BOLÍVAR, GERMAN ESPIONAGE IN SOUTH AMERICA

  Every politician seeking legitimacy and authority in South America tries to link himself in the public mind with Simón Bolívar, the early nineteenth-century hero regarded as a unifier who once ruled from Argentina to the Caribbean. Bolívar aspired to defend the hemisphere’s newly independent countries from the old colonial power, Spain, but also from the emerging continental power, the United States. In World War II, a hydra-like Nazi system of intelligence and communications operated five thousand miles south of Me
xico in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Its name: Operation Bolívar.

  The heart of the operation was radio, the same technology that was permeating the continent.

  In 1935, when the Argentine tango idol Carlos Gardel was killed in a plane crash near Medellín, Colombia, at the height of his fame, the same medium that had made the singer famous across the continent—radio—brought news of his death from the crash site. One of the first live broadcasts in Latin America, the transmission engendered a shared period of intense mourning across the lands.

  By the 1930s, radio carried human voices into every home where someone could make or buy a receiver. The voice of President Roosevelt brought comfort and information to Americans with his “fireside chats” during the crises of the Depression and war. Latin leaders, too, saw the advantage of using radio with its capacity to convey the illusion that the speaker was talking directly to each listener. In 1938, when President Lázaro Cárdenas made the defiant decision to nationalize the oil of Mexico, he announced it first to the radio public and two hours later to his cabinet.

  For the nuts and bolts of espionage, the Reich’s spies used radio transmitters and receivers large and small in dozens of locations. Atmospheric conditions in the southernmost part of the continent were better than in the north for transmitting to Europe, so Operation Bolívar received messages from agents in the United States, Mexico, and other points throughout the Americas and bounced them across the Atlantic to receivers in Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg. Some Operation Bolívar cells also forwarded dozens of microdot letters to Berlin and to drops in Spain and Portugal.

  Captain Dietrich Niebuhr embodied the qualities of the best local spy chiefs in the network: loyalty to the Reich, command capacity, a web of contacts from members of the upper crust to shady forgers. When Niebuhr arrived in Buenos Aires in 1936, he eased into his cover as naval attaché. Armed with introductions from a cousin who owned eighteen large firms in Germany, the tall, blonde, suave officer quickly developed valuable relationships among political and business elites throughout the Southern Cone.

  One of the smartest early moves Niebuhr made was to argue successfully with his chiefs in Germany against a new, ultrasecret Abwehr sabotage unit for South America, called Operation South Pole. Violence against British targets, such as sabotaging ships in port, was an abuse of a host nation’s neutrality and could undermine his nascent operation. (Later, Operation Bolívar provided information to U-boats that sank Allied ships anyway, on the open seas.)

  In 1939, when the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee sank on the River Plate, Niebuhr arranged for “internment” of its thousand-man crew in relatively pleasant conditions in Argentina, where many formed families. Niebuhr also arranged for the escape of more than two hundred of the men, those who were most skilled and valuable to the Reich. He hid them as stowaways with help from crew on Spanish and Portuguese ships or sent them with guides across the Andes to Chile. From there they took a Eurasian route favored by German spies during the war: via Japanese freighter across the Pacific to Vladivostok, overland by train to Western Europe. Some who escaped under Niebuhr became U-boat aces and continued to contribute to Allied losses at sea.

  At the embassy in Buenos Aires, Niebuhr had one of the fabled Enigma Machines, the top-secret, exceedingly complex Nazi encrypting apparatus—its possible combinations were in the range of a hundred and fifty million million million. During the war, Enigma Machines were located in at least half a dozen other places in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as aboard U-boats that plied their coasts.

  The Enigma Code was broken in July 1941 without the Germans knowing it. Eventually cryptanalysts at the top-secret Bletchley Park facility outside London were reading three thousand messages a day, although the pieces of information generally could not be acted upon individually without revealing the fact that the code had been broken. Nevertheless, an enormous amount of intelligence was garnered to help the Allied cause, including from Latin America.

  A document from one section at Bletchley Park (Hut 18, ISOS [Intelligence Section Oliver Strachey]) contains records of messages exchanged to and from transmitters in Berlin, Brussels, Prague, and Rio de Janeiro, and unspecified locations in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, and “South America.” Of the dates that are visible, the document shows the messages were recorded from August 7, 1941, almost immediately after the Enigma Code was broken, until August 1944.

  For all the importance of the Enigma Machines, the workhorse of Operation Bolívar was its system of radio communication for transmitting encoded messages—it was widespread and used directly by agents on the ground. In Argentina alone, operatives established eleven stations along the coast, from Patagonia in the south to Santa Fe province northwest of Buenos Aires. One large transmitter was buried on a working farm in a pit under a chicken coop, its antenna hidden in a grove of trees. In Brazil, agents who had not brought their own portable transmitter and receiver outfits with them from the Abwehr spy school in Hamburg had miniature systems built for about US$1,000. They fit into a suitcase and were employed at certain hours when transmission conditions were best, in residential neighborhood houses or rented offices.

  The Abwehr was not alone in spying for Germany and managing transmissions. SS captain Johannes Siegfried Becker, code name “Sargo,” was chief of all fifty intelligence agents in the region who worked for the Abwehr’s rival intelligence agency, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Considered among the most dangerous German spies for his technical skill and ability to organize agents reporting on Allied convoys, ore shipments, and the like, Becker had come to Buenos Aires on a sabotage mission, but was soon switched to espionage when the German Embassy objected to operations that might abuse Argentina’s neutrality. Among other places he traveled to was Brazil. There, in an unusual example of cooperation between the SD and the Abwehr, he boosted the quality and capacity of the network operated by the São Paulo businessman Albrecht Engels—the “Alfredo” often visited by the double agent Duŝko Popov. About half of Engels’s transmissions dealt with British and U.S. maritime activity, including descriptions of cargo and destinations. The information was not difficult to obtain—“Alfredo’s” informants included employees of a major shipping company.

  Albrecht Engels was a fine example of an Operation Bolívar spy, because he didn’t always wait for orders but did things on his own initiative. In 1939, the Germans staged two cargo vessels in Rio to provide tactical support for sea raiders set to be loosed upon English shipping. When one of them was about to depart, Engels took to the sky with a Brazilian Air Force pilot and spotted two British warships; he got word back to the port and saved the cargo ship from certain attack. In 1942, J. Edgar Hoover reported to Roosevelt that Engels’s post “appears to be the most important station in the chain of clandestine German radios in South America.”

  Despite the efficient and sometimes imaginative work of agents like Engels, some V-men fumbled in laughable ways. Dr. Emil Wolff, who worked for IG Farben, became nervous when he suspected the FBI was tailing him and threw his briefcase—with a codebook inside—overboard from a boat in the Panama Canal. (The FBI recovered it.) A subagent in Brazil, flummoxed on his first assignment, asked a German dentist who owned a microscope to read a microdot for him. (The dentist reported the event to local Nazi authorities.) When Engels and the German naval attaché in Rio became fed up with a newly arrived agent who insisted on superiority over “Alfredo,” they sent the man a fake telegram that said his presence in Germany was required immediately. Two weeks later, having sailed across the Atlantic to Europe and breathlessly arriving at a supervisor’s office, the irksome agent discovered he had been fooled. (He didn’t return.)

  * * *

  FBI estimates put the number of agents in Latin America who answered to Berlin over the course of the war, mostly to the Abwehr, at up to eight hundred. Canaris believed in using many operatives, including locals, in a kind of big-net theory: the wider the net, the more likely to catch us
eful information. Also, Hitler harbored a deep fear of the British foreign secret service—MI6—and wanted a vast network of intelligence agents to counteract it.

  With such large numbers in a region where people of many ethnicities lived, Nazi preoccupation with “racial purity” went out the window, especially after it became clear that the war would not end quickly. Miscegenation was overlooked. V-men and informants were not necessarily Nazis, but they were loyal to Germany, and some went unpaid—Canaris believed espionage was something one did out of allegiance to the fatherland. The spy rings’ paymasters, usually diplomats, could not always disburse enough funds at the right times to keep things running. Illicit methods were used to generate cash, such as trading in pharmaceuticals and contraband gems like emeralds and industrial diamonds. The black market goods, easy to hide, sailed to Europe with accomplices called “wolves,” who traveled as crewmen on Spanish and Portuguese ships.

  The bitter, dangerous rivalry that grew in Germany between the Abwehr and the fearsome SD with its Gestapo agents did not affect espionage operators in the New World the way it did in the Old. In Berlin, the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi party, kept card files on citizens, using extortion, blackmail, and torture to get information and preserve loyalty. Its operatives tapped the files of the Abwehr in a fight for turf, but also over ideological purity. Canaris, the Abwehr director, had never joined the Nazi party.

  Canaris thought he could protect the Abwehr from the SD’s director, Reinhard Heydrich, who once served as a junior officer to Canaris in the Imperial Navy, and who was dismissed in 1931 for “conduct unbecoming to an officer and gentleman.” Heydrich and Canaris not only knew each other, they became neighbors in Berlin. Despite the silent struggle between their services, the men and their wives sometimes met at each other’s houses in evenings to dine—Canaris often cooked—and to play chamber music together. Some reports speculate that Canaris knew a secret about Heydrich: that he had Jewish forbears.