Hitler's Secret War In South America, 1939–1945: German Military Espionage and Allied Counterespionage in Brazil

Introduction to the American Edition

Introduction to theAmerican Edition IN THE YEARS that followed World War II, hundreds of books were written about different aspects of that unprecedented conflict, but the details of the "secret war" in the West were slow to appear, in large part because of agreements concluded in 1945 between the American and British governments that forbade the release of information on covert operations, especially in the field of cryptanalysis, that is, the interception and decrypting of enemy radio communications .1 A curtain of silence thus descended on that vital phase of the Allied struggle against the European Axis. From the point of view of Germany's clandestine war effort, the situation was slightlydifferent because the Reich had lost the war; even so, the archives of the Abwehr, as the Amt/Ausland of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht , or Foreign Department of the Armed Forces High Command , was known, could not be located, and it was logically assumed that the Germans had destroyed them before the war ended.2 It was not until the 1960s that the silence surrounding the secret war of 1939-45 began to dissipate. In 1962 a high-rankingmember of the British intelligence community, Kim Philby, fled to the Soviet Union where he announced that he had been a Communist spy for thirty years. Philby took with him a wealth of confidential information on British secret operations, and it was with the aim of nullifying or minimizing the impact of any public revelations that Philby might make that London decided to authorize the publication of a preliminary study of the British clandestine effort during World War II. That book, written by H. Montgomery Hyde, a former intelligence officer, dealt with the British Security Coordination 2) HITLER'S SECRET WAR IN SOUTH AMERICA (BSC), a supersecret organization established in New York in 1940 under the leadership of Sir William Stephenson, whose code name was "Intrepid" and who directed a large part of the Allies' secret offensive. Hyde's work was followed in the mid-1960s by two studies of the Special Operations Executive, an agency set up in 1940 by Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze" through sabotage and subversion, and by McLachlan's book on British naval intelligence.3 After another several years of silence, London acquiesced in the publication in 1972 of the "Masterman Report" on British counterespionage during the war. Two years later, the British government lifted the veil on what was probably the greatest Allied secret of the war: "Ultra," the code name given to the information contained in the highly confidential communications between the German high command and theater commanders, messages that were transmitted by Enigma enciphering machines but which the British, from the early stages of the war on, intercepted and deciphered, thanks to a stolen Enigma machine and a small group of mathematical geniuses. British leaders thus learned Berlin's orders at the same time, and sometimes before, German commanders did. The publication of these books cleared the way for additional works that shed new light on the Allies' clandestine war: an official biography of Stephenson, based on BSCarchives; the memoirs of perhaps the most important double agent of the period; Brown's mammoth study of the Allies' campaign to deceivethe enemy about their plans for an invasion of the European continent; the works by Patrick Beesly and Ewen Montagu on British naval intelligence; and recent books on Ultra by Lewin, Bennett, and Garlifiski. During this time a considerable part of the missing Abwehr records was located in the vast collection of captured German documents that had been microfilmed and deposited in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. That discovery made possible the publication in 1971 of Ladislas Farago's best-selling study of wartime German militaryespionage in England and the United States, which has now been superseded by David Kahn's massively documented Hitler's Spies.4 The past few years, then, have witnessed great strides toward a more complete picture of the secret war in the West during the pe- INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION {3 riod 1939-45. But one significant theater of operation—South America—has been overlooked. It was popularly assumed in the United States during the early World War II era that South America, particularly Brazil, where a sizable German colony existed, was a hotbed of Nazi intrigue, or, at the very least, a fertile area for Axis troublemaking. In the 1930s Brazil had...