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

Foreword

ix Foreword Latin America was one of the few parts of the world that was not directly involved in World War II. As air raids and land campaigns laid waste to cities and countryside in Asia, Europe, and Africa, Latin America appeared to have remained at the margins of the drama that engulfed the vast portion of humanity. Certainly, this has long been the conventional historiographic wisdom. The received knowledge is not, of course, without some basis. Measured by the magnitude of the loss of life and the destruction of property, the Latin American experience during the war years was relatively tranquil. But the story of Latin America and World War II is more complicated . In recent years, the works of Thomas Leonard, Leslie Rout and John Bratzel, and Max Paul Friedman, among others, have directed renewed attention to Latin America during the war years. This scholarship has provided a greater appreciation of context and consequence and the nuanced ways in which the war insinuated itself into the conduct of daily life. No less important, new attention has been drawn to the ways in which the war was “fought” in Latin America. Thomas Schoonover’s fascinating study of Heinz Lüning in Havana makes one more contribution toward an understanding of the ways in which Latin America served as site and setting for the greater war of the world. At first glance, Lüning’s story seems to be no more than an inconsequential episode of the war. And, indeed, in many ways, and certainly in a comparative sense, the Lüning affair never rose to any level higher than an episode incidental to the global conflict, with the added allure of tropical intrigue not unlike the imagined mystique associated with Casablanca. In the case of Lüning, it was Havana: stereotyped as a romantic Caribbean seaport, something of an exotic New World center of international espionage, a saga of a Nazi spy and Nazi spy hunters, intelligence and counterintelligence intrigue, bars and brothels, corrupt politicians —all in all, heady stuff. There is sufficient drama in the Lüning affair to arouse the curiosity of even the most casual espionage buff. In fact, there is much more to the Lüning story. The need to protect the Caribbean sea—lanes against German submarine warfare was vital to the uninterrupted Allied supply of raw materials from Latin America, most notably petroleum and bauxite, of course, but also sugar and coffee : the military success on the war front and the morale of the home front depended on it. No less important, while the Caribbean was distant from the decisive maritime dramas unfolding in the Pacific and Atlantic , it was, nevertheless, a vital strategic transit site for Allied transoceanic shipping through the Panama Canal. A two-front war could be sustained only by secure access to two-ocean shipping lanes. Lüning’s activities in Havana—the principal port in the West Indies—could not but be perceived as a threat to the security of Allied merchant and naval vessels. Taken as a case study, the account of the life and death of a German spy in Havana during the early 1940s, moreover, serves to shed light on facets of multiple levels of daily life in the practice of espionage during World War II: how intelligence services went about the business of spying , and how counterintelligence services went about the business of catching spies. Schoonover’s compelling account of invisible ink, secret mail drop-off sites, intercepted transatlantic correspondence and tapped telegraph messages, secret rendezvous and illicit liaisons, all conducted in the guise of the mundane and ordinary comings and goings of everyday life, provides palpable corroboration of the aphorism that things are never quite what they seem to be. The detailed texture of Schoonover’s study provides insight into the ways in which foreign counterintelligence services forged collaborative practices, the ways in which they shared information and acted in concert , the methods they used in common, and the occasions when they worked at cross-purposes with each other. Contained within the Lüning story is a fascinating account of the ways in and means with which the Cubans (Servicio de Investigaciones de Actividades Enemigas), the x Foreword Americans (FBI), and the British (Secret Intelligence Service) worked together to disrupt the activities of a common foe. The account of German wartime espionage also offers a deeper understanding of the workings of...