Hitler's Man in Havana: Heinz Luning and Nazi Espionage in Latin America

Preface

xv Preface On August 31, 1942, the combined efforts of British, Cuban, and U.S. counterintelligence captured a German Abwehr (intelligence) agent, A-3779, Heinz August Adolf Sirich Lüning (aliases: Lumann, Enrique Augusto Luni, Rafael Castillo, Manuel González, and numerous other code or cover names). U.S. and Cuban officials treated Lüning as the German master spy in the Americas. Presumably, he was one of the chief managers of the German espionage service in the Western Hemisphere. This Allied counterespionage success was represented (in self-serving exaggeration) as a first significant reversal of Allied misfortune. This story , veiled behind secrecy for over sixty years, is worth exploring because it forms a part of the campaign in the winter of 1942–1943 that halted the Axis successes. The Lüning story played out in the period when the Allies were able to push back from the edge of defeat. The events and personalities involved in the story of Lüning offered intrigue, drama, and humor. Four objectives motivated me in this project . First, there was an intriguing, yet largely unknown, relation between German U-boats, U.S. and British security and intelligence activity in the Gulf of Mexico–Caribbean area, and U.S.-Cuban relations during World War II that needed to be told clearly (from declassified SIS files). (The U.S. Special Intelligence Service, or SIS—not to be confused with the British Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6—was an agency linked to the FBI.) The stakes were considerably higher than merely Allied shipping security in the Caribbean region. The Allies (the United States, the British Empire, France, the Soviet Union, China, and other, smaller countries) considered the east-west shipping routes through the Caribbean and the Panama Canal as necessary for their twoocean , two-front war. They also used north-south shipping routes in and near the Caribbean to move essential strategic raw materials and food items to the United States and, in some cases, on to Britain, China, and the Soviet Union. Second, I wanted to describe the life of a common intelligence field agent—his training and his activity. In this case, the German field agent told the story to U.S., Cuban, and British agents who conducted extensive research to verify and amplify his version. This story differed then from the numerous upper-echelon Abwehr officers whose published memoirs were unfiltered narratives of their successes and rare failures. Third, I discovered how political figures from various countries treated, manipulated, and twisted a simple intelligence agent’s story for their personal benefit. The pursuit, capture, and execution of Lüning allowed specific U.S. and Cuban officials to win praise, rewards, and influence , even when they had little role in tracking him down. And, fourth, I was intrigued with a novelist-spy’s vision of what a specific field agent might do. In this case, the novelist had some counterespionage background as a field agent and also as an agent handler for Britain’s MI6. There seemed to be a link between the real field agent Lüning and Graham Greene’s fictional field agent James Wormold in Our Man in Havana. I found the link in the startling parallels between the activities of the two spies. Although Lüning has been largely forgotten by history, he may live on, unbeknownst to readers, in one of the most popular espionage novels of all time. For different reasons, finding the Abwehr (the German foreign intelligence agency) agent in Cuba was not simple in 1942, nor had it become any easier in 2002 when I began a four-year quest to obtain FBI material on Heinz August Lüning. In 1942, the Allied agents had Lüning’s secret ink writings but could not find the writer; sixty years later, I knew the writer-agent but could not easily get to see the written FBI material about his activity and arrest. Lüning entered Cuba on September 29, 1941. After eleven months of routine and unsuccessful spying, he was arrested on the morning of August 31, 1942. At the end of World War II, Theodore Koop, the assistant to Byron Price, the director of the Office of Censorship, recalled Lüning as “a xvi Preface grave threat to the United Nations [the Allied nations, not the postwar international government].”1 Koop wrote a book in 1946, Weapon of Silence , that exaggerated and...