The People & the Spies

In the great hall of Luna Park, Buenos Aires' Madison Square Garden, 30,000 Argentines gathered this week to voice friendship for the U.S. on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

This sentiment might well have been heeded long since by President Ramon S. Castillo. He had had concrete evidence of Nazi espionage within his country when a Gestapo agent and "diplomat," Gottfried Sandstede escaped (TIME, Sept. 8, 1941). As Argentines gathered on Pearl Harbor Day, he had more evidence, again pointing directly to Buenos Aires' German Embassy.

Federal police, acting at last on information documented in a U.S. State Department memorandum, grabbed 38 suspected Nazi agents. The catch included a deep-sea diver who had volunteered to attach time bombs to the keels of Allied ships in Buenos Aires harbor. His activities and those of other agents, including a Swiss and Paraguayan, pointed to the German Embassy, and in particular to Naval Attache Captain Dietrich Niebuhr.

Evidence in preliminary court hearings, based on six confessions, tied Nazi espionage with the known sinking of at least two British cargo ships. Probably scores of others were doomed by code messages on high-powered radio sets and interchange of information through Spanish ships. Subsequent developments were expected to give chapter & verse on a continental espionage system of Nazis, Fascists and Japanese operating in Buenos Aires with all the trigger men expelled from Brazil and Chile.

To press the charges against the German diplomats, the case was placed in the hands of the Supreme Court, which alone can take action against persons shielded by diplomatic immunity. If evidence is sufficient, the Foreign Ministry, in Argentine procedure, will ask the Embassy if the accused agree to trial. If they refuse, their guilt is taken for granted, and they will be stripped of their immunity and subject to arrest. To escape this, they could take refuge in the extraterritorial safety of the Embassy, or flee.

When Gottfried Sandstede fled, the Argentines were hopping mad. That was before Pearl Harbor, before their ships were sunk by Axis raiders, before they were formally accused by Sumner Welles of harboring Axis spies. The public at that time demanded the ousting of Nazi Ambassador Baron Edmund von Thermann. What might happen this time, if events followed a similar course, was anybody's guess. But it was clear that, as they already had in Chile (TIME, Nov. 16), the words of Sumner Welles were bearing overripe fruit in Argentina.

In Chile, which for some time has been reported to be, on the verge of a break with the Axis, President Juan Antonio Rios marked the Pearl Harbor anniversary with a message to President Roosevelt and the U.S.: "My country will be at the side of the democracies, defending the ideals of liberty and justice."

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