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by Donald Goddard with Lester K. Coleman
From Chapter 4
After five months in the 'Home of the
Woonie Bird', I was open to the first reasonable offer.'
It came from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), which, as Coleman later
discovered, served not only the nation's youth but also the
military-industrial complex that had so exercised President Dwight D.
Eisenhower in the 1950s.
Seated one day in his broom closet, writing copy and eating Krispy
Kremes, Coleman took a call from Mark Clayton of the BSA National Public
Relations Office. An Eagle Scout from Mobile had been selected to meet
President Richard Nixon on the White House lawn, said Clayton. Was
Woonie Radio interested in covering this event?
'Sure,' said Coleman. 'I'll take a tape feed of our Eagle Scout meeting
the President of the United States. Great stuff. I'd like to ask him how
it feels to get chosen out of four million Boy Scouts to shake his
President by the hand. We'll do an interview, okay?'
Tongue intermittently in cheek, Coleman taped a few questions and
answers and then, jokingly, asked Clayton if the Boy Scouts of America
were looking for someone with a bit of broadcasting experience.
'Well,' said Clayton, surprised. 'Now that you mention it, yes. You mean
you'd be interested in taking a job with us?'
Coleman looked around his broom closet newsroom, with its mops and pails
and industrial-sized bottles of Mr. Clean, and sighed for his lost
illusions.
'Sounds like an exciting opportunity to me,' he said.
Brought over from Britain in 1910 by Chicago newspaper publisher William
D. Boyce with the idea of building character in his street-corner
newsboys, Scouting had grown by 1972 into a nationwide movement,
chartered by Congress, with a full-time professional staff of 4000
directed from BSA headquarters in North Brunswick, New Jersey.
After a preliminary meeting with Clayton in Mobile, Coleman was flown in
for two days of interviews and put up in the Scout guesthouse, next door
to a museum full of Norman Rockwell paintings, in the middle of a
30-acre game preserve criss-crossed with neatly tagged nature trails.
The job opening he had stumbled upon was in the public relations
department, which already had a staff of 20 writers and photographers --
many of them former military public information officers -- under the
general direction of Ron Phillippo, a cigar-smoking outdoorsman in a
three-piece suit, whose secretary, Marcia Schwartz, and right-hand man,
Russ Butkins, USN (retd) between them ran the place. Being all 'print
people', with no practical experience of radio or television, they
needed somebody who could get the Scout story 'on the air' for $12,000 a
year.
Satisfied he was made of the right stuff, BSA offered Coleman the job,
and in March 1972, a big cross-country moving van delivered the family's
worldly goods to their new home in Heightstown, near Princeton, New
Jersey, about 20 minutes by Toyota south of New Brunswick on Route 130.
If not quite as he had imagined. Coleman had made the big time as the
BSA's National Event Public Relations Executive.
A former Cub Scout with a school troop at eight, he soon discovered
there was more to modern Scouting than rubbing damp sticks together in
the wilderness. It was a franchise operation. With a network of regional
offices, heavily staffed with former military personnel, to oversee 'the
product', the BSA sold franchises to Local Councils in cities and towns
across the nation. These councils, in turn, employed full-time
professional staff to recruit volunteers and sponsors to run and finance
Scout troops at neighborhood levels.
In overall charge of the operation was a Chief Scout, a full-time
salaried executive of BSA, Inc., and a volunteer counterpart with the
title of National President. In 1972, they were, respectively, Alden
Barber, a polished, smooth-talking businessman who could have stepped
out of any corporate boardroom, and Robert W. Sarnoff, chief executive
officer of the Radio Corporation of America. [AB-1]
Coleman's connection with the big time was through the National Public
Relations Committee, a volunteer group he was encouraged to cultivate
for help and support. One of its members was Walter Cronkite, of CBS
News.
'Can you imagine?'
Twenty years on, Coleman still remembers the excitement of hopping on a
train to New York, taking a cab uptown from Penn station to the corner
of 57th Street and 10th Avenue and walking in to tell the guard he was
there to see Walter Cronkite.
'And then actually getting in to see him. Escorted down one narrow
hallway after another, past Xerox machines, past dark studios with the
ghosts of John Cameron Swazy and Edward R. Murrow, then into the CBS
newsroom, into Cronkite's glass fishbowl of an office, and there he is
-- thinner and younger-looking in person, wearing a khaki suit, loafers
kicked off, feet on the desk, talking to me about the next Explorer
Scout Olympics in Fort Collins, Colorado.'
Most of the national events Coleman worked on were organized by the
BSA's Explorer Division, the then-new co-ed Scout 'product' for young
people between fourteen and twenty, offering hands-on experience in the
career fields that interested them.
It was the Explorer programme that finally married the Boy Scouts of
America to the military-industrial complex. The military saw Scouting as
a training ground for leaders who were also good team-players,
disciplined, respectful of authority and imbued with ideals of service
to God and country, while the business community saw it as a politically
neutral means of indoctrinating youth in the principles of free
enterprise capitalism and the American way.
Nobody had a bad word for Scouting. It was the perfect public relations
vehicle for acquiring civic virtue on the cheap while continuing the
ruthless pursuit of corporate self-interest in government and the market
place. In government, all the way up to Federal level, sponsorship of
Career- Interest Explorer Posts proved so popular among image-sensitive
agencies such as the police that a special unit was set up at BSA
headquarters to administer 'Law-Enforcement Exploring' and to work
alongside existing departments responsible for Congressional Relations,
Military Relations, Mormon Relations (the Boy Scouts of America is the
official youth movement of the Mormon Church), Corporate Relations and
so on.
As Coleman would discover at first hand, it was not so much that
Scouting was controlled by the octopus as simply incapable of denying it
a favor. When a two-star general in Washington called a retired colonel
in North Brunswick to ask if the BSA could find a job for one of 'our
people' from overseas, the only possible answer was, 'Yes, sir.
In his two years at headquarters, Coleman came across several 'spooks'
cooling off in executive niches of the Boy Scout Movement, and later
became one himself. He also came to appreciate the mutual benefit of
having a Boy Scout troop on every significant US military base around
the world. It not only helped with the BSA's numbers game but served as
a benevolent advertisement for the American way of life, as well as a
convenient cloak for low-level intelligence gathering.
As with any franchise operation, growth was the bottom line. In 1972,
the BSA's national advertising slogan claimed that 'Scouting today is a
lot more than you think', but in fact it was a lot less. Under pressure
from head office to meet ever higher 'sales' targets, Local Council
staffs had begun to create imaginary Scout troops, in much the same way
as Teamster union officials had once created 'paper' Locals, and to pad
the rolls of existing troops with phantom members.
By 1974, the BSA had 6.5 million Scouts on its books, of which two
million existed only in the minds of hard-pressed District Executives.
It was too many. When somebody at last blew the whistle, not even the
National Public Relations Office could explain away so great a
discrepancy. The Scouting hierarchy collapsed from top to bottom,
sending Chief Scout Alden Barber into the decent obscurity of Santa
Barbara, California.
In 1972, however, still untarnished by scandal, the BSA plugged Coleman
into the military-industrial complex through Tom Geohagen, Department of
Public Affairs, US Steel, Washington, D.C. A short, white-haired man
with big ears and a booming radio announcer's voice -- he had worked for
years at NBC News -- Geohagen was chairman of a high-powered committee
of media experts put together to publicize the National Explorer
Presidents' Congress, an annual meeting in Washington of Explorer Post
leaders from all over America. The event was Coleman's first assignment,
and Geohagen liked his style. Appointing himself Coleman's mentor, he
was soon urging him to 'use this Scout business' as a stepping stone to
higher things, perhaps in government service, where he could make the
most of his command of Arabic and his background in the Middle East.
Wherever we went in Washington, Tom introduced me to his contacts
[Coleman recalls]. We would go for lunch down the street from his office
to the Army-Navy Club, and he knew everybody. You'd get these grey men
in grey suits, sitting around smoking cigars in red leather armchairs
under portraits of Nimitz and Patton, and they'd all say hello and pass
the time of day. One, I remember, was General Danny Graham, an old spook
buddy of Tom's, who had been sent over from the Pentagon to clean house
at the CIA.
'Now there's a guy you ought to talk to,' Tom said afterwards. 'You'll
like him, and I know he'd be real interested in your background. Tell
you what -- why don't I set up a meeting?'
'No, Tom,' I said. 'Thanks all the same. I still want to see how far I
can go with journalism.'
But Geohagen kept on trying, determined his protege should make the most
of himself. His next manoeuvre on Coleman's behalf was to secure a staff
position for him with the US Olympic Team at the 20th Olympiad in Munich
that September. This was exciting but also embarrassing, for Mark
Clayton, who had got him his job in the first place, had to be bumped
out of the slot to make way for him.
'It was Clayton's assignment, Tom, and he's my boss,' Coleman protested.
Half-heartedly. 'And why me? I've only been here six months.'
'Well, let's just say you have special talents that your committee feels
would be better suited to this assignment,' said Geohagen. 'Let's just
say there are people who want to see how you make out, how you handle
yourself under fire, so to speak. So let's show 'em, okay?'
Of course it was okay. It was damned okay. To be in Munich with the US
team at the Olympic Games was about as far as you could get from a broom
closet in Mobile.
Geohagen's wish to see how Coleman handled himself 'under fire' turned
out to be curiously prophetic, for the 1972 Olympiad was to be
remembered, not for Mark Spitz's seven gold medals or Cathy Rigby's
bare-bottom picture in Sports Illustrated, but for the slaughter of
Israeli athletes by hooded assassins from Black September.
It was Coleman's first direct experience of Arab terrorism. Although he
saw no more of the siege and carnage than anyone else in the Olympic
Village, he had earlier taken the fullest advantage of his staff pass to
explore the compound and to fraternize with athletes and officials from
other countries, particularly those from the Middle East for the chance
it gave him to practice his Arabic.
Although there were armed guards everywhere, security was a joke.
Photo-ID badges were rarely checked, and no attempt at all was made to
confine badge-holders to the specific areas of the Village for which
they had security clearance. In theory, only someone with a press pass
could gain access to the Olympic Press Centre, for example, but Coleman
came and went as he pleased, in and out three or four times a day, every
day, without ever being challenged.
Before the attack, he enjoyed the same freedom of movement to meet and
drink coffee with his new Arab friends in their Olympic quarters -- and
also with Andrei, one of the Soviet team's 'trainers', who spent a lot
of time in their company, drinking beer and picking away at salt fish
wrapped in brown paper. After the attack, Coleman saw no cause to wonder
how Black September had managed to smuggle explosives and automatic
weapons into the compound, but he wondered long and hard about Andrei,
who had mysteriously disappeared when the terrorists struck, and about
the not-so-mysterious defection of the Arab teams, who now melted away
for fear of Israeli reprisals.
Like everyone else, Coleman watched the drama build up to its bloody
denouement on television, still misusing his pass to keep abreast of the
latest developments via the Press Centre's battery of monitors.
Under the critical weight of world attention, Munich's beleaguered
police chief, Manfred Schreiber, was now at pains to lock the barn door
after the terrorist horse had bolted. His officers were ordered to
question everybody they could trace who had set foot in the Arab camp in
the course of the Games, including Lester Coleman, public relations
assistant with the US Olympic Team, on loan from the Boy Scouts of
America.
In what turned out to be a curious link with the future, Coleman struck
up a friendship with Hartmut Mayer, a local police officer whom he would
meet again 15 years later in Cyprus, when Mayer was resident agent on
the island for the BKA, and like Coleman, concerned with a DEA operation
where sloppy security opened the way to an even bloodier atrocity than
at Munich -- the destruction of Flight 103.
For Coleman, there would be other curious links, too, between Munich and
Lockerbie. In 1987, after renewing his acquaintance with Mayer, he was
to work on the same poorly managed DEA operation with a
Lebanese-American named Ibrahim El-Jorr, a key informant who claimed to
have been one of the US Army support group sent into Munich after Black
September took over the village.
In the troubled aftermath of Lockerbie, Coleman would also meet up with
Juval Aviv, a private investigator hired by Pan Am, who was said to have
been a member of the Mossad hit team turned loose after the Munich
massacre by Israel's Golda Meir to track down and kill every member of
the Black September squad responsible.
But the strongest link for Coleman was the continuing fascination of the
American intelligence community with Arab terrorism.
On his first day back in the office after flying home with the Olympic
team, he was called down to Washington by his sponsor.
'There's some people would like to hear about your experiences,'
Geohagen said, on their way out to Georgetown to have lunch at the
Sheraton Park Hotel. 'Some of Danny Graham's boys. I told 'em you
wouldn't mind. You can probably give 'em some useful insights, just from
being there in Munich.'
'Think so?' Coleman shrugged. 'I'll be glad to talk to them, Tom, but
there were a lot of people a lot closer to what happened than me. Are
you saying they didn't have any of their own people in the Village? They
must have done. I heard the KGB was all over the place.'
'Well, I expect they did. But I guess they didn't have anybody out there
who spoke Arabic. Or spent much time talking to the Arab teams.
It was only when somebody stopped by their table in the Sheraton's bar
to say they were expected upstairs after lunch that Coleman began to
wonder how Geohagen knew how he had spent his off-duty time in Munich,
and it rather took the edge off his appetite.
After the meal, they adjourned for coffee to a suite on the third floor,
where Geohagen introduced him to three men, who identified themselves as
Bob, Nat and Herb, and then excused himself, saying he would see Coleman
back in his office after they had finished. Nervous at first, but soon
relaxing in their warmth and friendliness, Coleman told them about
Andrei and tentatively identified him from a grainy ten by eight print
that Herb produced from a file folder on his lap.
'You know who he is?' asked Coleman eagerly. 'Is he KGB?'
'It's not important,' Bob said. 'We keep tabs on all kinds of people.
Can you tell us what you talked about?'
'Oh, Olympic-type things. You know, how it's good for East and West to
get together, for people to exchange ideas, one to one, leaving politics
out of it for a change. That sort of stuff.'
'You didn't talk politics? Not at all?'
'Well, depends what you mean by politics. Not cold war politics anyway.
He asked me a lot of questions about what was going on here. Said he
couldn't understand how people could be out of work or homeless or
without proper medical attention and still be loyal Americans. He seemed
to know a lot about black militant groups. Our 'dissidents' is what he
called them.'
'Uh-huh. And how do you feel about 'em?'
'Me?'
Coleman spent 15 minutes defending his own political views before Bob
finally turned to the subject of the Arabs he had talked to in Munich.
And the same thing happened. After covering the ground, the three seemed
to be at least as interested in examining Coleman's views on the
Arab-Israeli question as the views expressed by the people he had met.
'Did you form any opinion about where the terrorists were from?' asked
Nat, pouring him another cup of coffee.
'Well, I only know what I heard and saw on television,' Coleman said.
'But one of them sounded Libyan to me.'
'Libyan? Black September is a Palestinian group.'
'Yeah, I know. But King Idris took in hundreds of refugees from
Palestine in the Fifties -- the guy could still have been a member of
the PLO. Seemed to me I recognized the accent. I worked with two
Palestinians in Libya when my father was out there.'
They appeared to know about that, too, and after a lengthy discussion of
Middle East politics, went on to ask him about what he had told Hartmut
Mayer, of the Munich police, and how he felt generally about the
Germans, their security arrangements and their attitude towards the
Israelis.
The questioning went on for more than two hours, and ended with another
round of warm handshakes as they ushered him into a taxi for the ride
back to Geohagen's office on K Street, North West.
'It had all been very friendly,' Coleman recalls, 'but I left feeling
drained, as if I'd just sat through a really testing examination. But I
also felt relieved from telling everything I knew to people I thought
could do something about it, who could stop another Munich from
happening. I guess I was still naive enough, going on twenty-nine to
believe in the fatherly image of the American government, as somehow
all-protecting, all-knowing, and capable of fixing anything.'
By the time Coleman reached K Street, Geohagen had already heard from
the octopus.
'They were very impressed,' he said. 'You know, Les, you really ought to
consider working for those guys. You could have a big future there.'
'Well, thanks, Tom,' said Coleman. 'I'm flattered by their interest and
I'm glad if I've been of help. But, like I say, I really am hooked on
broadcasting. I want to see how far I can go.'
'Yeah, well, I told them that. But if you ever change your mind, Danny
Graham says you're to go see him about it. Anytime.'
_______________
Librarian's Comments:
[AB-1] See
"Trading With the Enemy," by Charles
Higham:
The head of RCA during World War II was Colonel David
Sarnoff, a stocky, square-set, determined man with a slow, subdued
voice, who came from Russia as an immigrant at the turn of the century
and began as a newspaper seller, messenger boy, and Marconi Wireless
operator. He became world famous in 1912, at the age of twenty-one, as
the young telegraph operator who first picked up word of the sinking of
the Titanic: for seventy-two hours he conducted ships to the stricken
vessel. He rose rapidly in the Marconi company, from inspector to
commercial manager in 1917. He became general manager of RCA in 1922 at
the age of thirty-one and president just before he was 40. Under his
inspired organization NBC inaugurated network broadcasting and RCA and
NBC became one of the most colossal of the American multinational
corporations, pioneers in television and telecommunications.
After Pearl Harbor, Sarnoff cabled Roosevelt, "All of our facilities and
personnel are ready and at your instant service. We await your command."
Sarnoff played a crucial role, as crucial as Behn's, in the U.S. war
effort, and, like Behn, he was given a colonelcy in the U.S. Signal
Corps. He solved complex problems, dealt with a maze of difficult
requirements by the twelve million members of the U.S. armed forces, and
coordinated details related to the Normandy landings. He prepared the
whole printed and electronic press-coverage of V-J day; in London in
1944, with headquarters at Claridge's Hotel, he was Eisenhower's
inspired consultant and earned the Medal of Merit for his help in the
occupation of Europe.
Opening in 1943 with a chorus of praise from various generals, the new
RCA laboratories had proved to be indispensable in time of war.
But the public, which thought of Sarnoff as a pillar of patriotism,
would have been astonished to learn of his partnership with the enemy
through Transradio and TTP. The British public, beleaguered and bombed,
would have been equally shocked to learn that British Cable and
Wireless, 10 percent owned by the British government, and under virtual
government control in wartime, was in fact also in partnership with the
Germans and Italians through the same companies and proxies.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Hans Blume, manager of Transradio in
Chile, set up an arrangement in connection with his related clandestine
station, PYL, to transmit Nazi propaganda, coordinate espionage routes,
give ship arrivals and departures, supply information on U.S. military
aid, U.S. exports, the Latin American defense measures, and set up
communications with German embassies throughout South America.
Transradio was equally active in Rio and Buenos Aires.
In Brazil, Transradio was known as Radiobras, its mixed American,
British, Nazi, and Italian shares permanently deposited in -- of course
-- the National City Bank of New York in Rio. Its directors were
American, Italian, German, and French. Transradio's London bank
transferred as much as a quarter of a million shares of Transradio stock
from Nazi-controlled banks to the National City Bank branch in 1942.
In Argentina the board was again a mixture of Nazi, Italian, and Allied
members. Like the members of the Bank for International Settlements,
though with even less excuse, the directors sat around a table
discussing the future of Fascist alliances. So extreme was the situation
that many messages could not be sent to Allied capitals by U.S.
embassies or consulates without going through Axis hands first.
On March 15, 1942, Transradio in London instructed its Buenos Aires
branch to open a radio-photograph circuit to Tokyo. Since British post
office authorities were in charge of British Cable and Wireless's
wartime operations, the British government was presumed to have
authorized this act. On March 16 the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires
reported to the State Department in Washington that the opening of the
radio-photograph circuit "would appear to offer the Japanese opportunity
of transmitting news photos unfavorable to the united nations to Buenos
Aires for distribution here and in other countries."
On March 16, Thomas Burke of the State Department sent a note to State's
Breckinridge Long saying, over three months after Pearl Harbor, "Now
that we are at war and parties to Resolution XL of the Rio Conference,
it seems proper to require our companies to desist from carrying any
Axis traffic in the other American republics. It is our understanding in
this connection that the Treasury Department in the future will require
licenses of American communications companies desiring to carry traffic
of this nature. ... As far as the past is concerned, it is believed that
we can give oral assurances to the companies that they will not be
prosecuted against." It is of interest to note that those assurances
extended into the future and that indeed the companies were not
prosecuted against at any time.
At the same time, London allegedly authorized Transradio to transmit
messages from South American capitals direct to Rome. The British
authorities had cut off ltalcable's line to Rome at Gibraltar in 1939,
but Transradio now took over its Italian partner's transmissions at a 50
percent discount.
Simultaneously, the Transradio stations, according to State Department
reports with the full knowledge of David Sarnoff, kept up a direct line
to Berlin. The amount of intelligence passed along the lines can
scarcely be calculated. The London office was in constant touch with New
York throughout the war, sifting through reports from Argentina, Brazil,
and Chile and sending company reports to the Italian and German
interests.
In a remarkable example of the pot calling the kettle black, Nando Behn,
the nephew of Sosthenes Behn, cabled his uncle from Buenos Aires to New
York on June 29, 1942: "It is about time something is done down here to
cut out the sole communication center in the Americas with Berlin. Our
competitors, Transradio, have a direct radio circuit with Berlin and you
can be pretty sure that every sailing from Buenos Aires is in Berlin
before the ship is out of sight."
General Robert C. Davis never seemed to question the fact that his
Swedish fellow board members were proxies of an enemy government. Nor
that secret documents, charts, and patents were being transferred with
speed, accuracy, and secrecy, with the authorization of the Japanese
Minister of communications, to South America direct.
On July 10, 1942, adhering to terms of the Rio Conference at which
Sumner Welles had succeeded in obtaining agreements for discontinuing
communications with the Axis, the Argentine Minister of the Interior
addressed an official letter to the Director General of Posts and
Telegraphs, seeking to suspend such connections for the duration.
Despite that fact, Transradio and RCA, like their counterparts in ITT,
pretended they feared that if they did not discontinue the circuits, the
Argentine government would retaliate by nationalizing them.
By blaming the Argentine, Chilean, and Brazilian cabinets, Sarnoff and
his own board proved conclusively that they were interested in business
as usual in wartime.
On July 12, two days after Argentina's intention to disconnect the
circuits was made clear, an urgent meeting was held in the office of
Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of
communications and visas, and a former ambassador to Italy, admirer of
Mussolini, and notorious block to Jewish refugee immigration. Among
those present were Sarnoff, Sir Campbell Stuart, New York representative
of British Cable and Wireless, RCA vice-president W.A. Winterbottom, and
General Davis. It was graciously decided that Davis should go to
Argentina and Chile and "have a look see." The ostensible purpose of
Davis's mission was to do everything in his power to close down the
circuits. He would travel with an engineer, Phillip Siling, of the FCC
(and ITT) and Commander George Schecklin of the Office of War
Information (and RCA).
At a further meeting on July 20, setting out details of the mission,
Breckinridge Long calmly referred to the importance of the question,
pointing out without anger the unfortunate fact that "a stream of
information is being sent out by the consortium stations with resulting
losses in our shipping." Sir Campbell Stuart of British Cable and
Wireless coolly promised to keep his government "advised of the decision
of this meeting." It was agreed that the State Department would take
care of all costs of Davis's mission and arrange the necessary
priorities in terms of passports and visas.
Davis traveled to the South American cities and began interviewing the
local directors and chiefs of staff. He either was completely blind to
the facts, or lied to cover his associates. Despite the fact that every
branch of Transradio was bristling with Nazis, he dislodged only two:
Henri Pincernin, the Vichy manager in Buenos Aires, and Hans Blume in
Valparaiso. Ernesto Aguirre, president of the board of directors of
Transradio in Buenos Aires, was kept on despite the fact that he was
also on the board of the Nazi branch of General Electric as well as of
Italian, Japanese, and German companies.
In Buenos Aires, Rio, and other cities, Davis retained important Nazis.
One of these, Jorge Richter, an official of Siemens who moved from
branch to branch, was reported by the FBI to be an espionage agent of
the Nazi High Command.
On August 18, 1942, Davis cabled Long from Santiago, Chile, stating that
he could give Transradio there "a clean bill of health," and that the
company was "entirely under Allied control." Yet in January 1943 the FBI
was to supply its own report based on an independent investigation
saying that Transradio there still had four receivers tuned in to Tokyo,
Berlin, London, and New York and that Hans Blume's brother, Kurt, was
now in charge. Similar reports reached Washington on Buenos Aires and
Rio.
On August 25, 1942, Davis, Sarnoff, Winterbottom, and Breckinridge Long
met in Long's office to hear General Davis give RCA a complete whitewash
in South America. He said, "There is a satisfactory condition now
existing. ... The communication facilities of Transradio ... are in
friendly hands." Friendly to whom? one might ask; but Long conveyed to
Cordell Hull his own satisfaction with the situation, even confirming
such an outrageous statement as, "Dr. Aguirre is entirely pro-Ally and
cooperative."
On August 31, Davis presented his report to an understandably delighted
RCA shareholders' meeting. He read messages that the State Department
had conveyed to the Italian and German proxies in the middle of the war.
The French and Germans urged Davis via the board not to make any further
changes in South America. None was made except that an American, George
W. Hayes, took over in Buenos Aires. He found himself as managing
director of a mixed Axis and Allied board. He also allegedly did not
enforce the suggestion that Aguirre resign from his Nazi companies --
until October 6, 1943.
Despite pretensions to the contrary, and promises to close down the
circuits, they continued. Breckinridge Long proved incapable of
vigorously enforcing the disconnections or unwilling to do so. The
British government seemed to be prepared to let the matter drift on
indefinitely. Whenever it was suggested by Long that the British should
disconnect, Sir Campbell Stuart indicated he was waiting for the
Americans to act. Sarnoff waited for Stuart and Sosthenes Behn for
Sarnoff. The buck was passed to South American governments, from London
to New York and back again, while the profits and the espionage
continued.
The U.S. Commercial Company sat on the matter on September 25, 1942, as
part of the FCC special board in charge of hemispheric communications.
Hugh Knowlton reported that RCA had instructed Transradio in Argentina
and Chile to close the circuits of the Axis "when the British did so."
The British ambassador in Washington had advised FCC Acting Chairman C.J.
Durr "that the British government expects daily to be able to report
that the British representatives in these two companies have been so
instructed." ITT "would also close their circuits when the British did."
By October 1942 the matter was still dragging on. At a meeting at the
State Department on October 7, Sarnoff took the view that he would
"generously waive consideration" of the commercial interests at stake.
Such "generosity" was surely mandatory in wartime. Ignoring the fact
that the British directors had said that it was up to him to discontinue
the South American circuits if he wanted to, and that much of South
America had turned against the Axis, he repeated that the British
directors had still to concur in the action, and he questioned whether
the order to close would be obeyed by the local managements in each case
-- ignoring the fact that he had the power through Davis to fire anybody
who disobeyed such orders.
By February 1943, Transradio was still in business. On February 10,
RCA's W.A. Winterbottom cabled Martin Hallauer of British Cable and
Wireless in London that he was making sure that RCA received all
dividends and interests of Transradio, supervised all accounts, and
helped maintain its offices in London. Even as the war deepened, RCA and
British Cable and Wireless continued to own a substantial proportion of
Transradio's stocks. In Brazil in March 1943, seven months after Brazil
was at war with Germany, RCA's Radiobras held 70,659 German shares: part
of the 240,000 voting shares held by the National City Bank of New York
in Rio. On March 22 a British Cable and Wireless executive wrote from
London to State that the Swedes, who represented the Nazi interests, had
received the minutes of the latest board meeting and had sent them to
Berlin and Paris.
On May 24, 1943, Long called Sarnoff with a mild complaint "that we have
reason to believe that more messages than the agreed 700 code groups a
week are being sent from Buenos Aires by the Axis powers for their
Governments." Long added, "There may be sound reasons why your man
George W. Hayes refuses to disclose the exact number of messages sent in
code groups by each of the Axis representatives to their Governments.
But I don't see any reason why Hayes shouldn't ask for a report on all
code groups being sent day by day and to include a report on all
belligerents. If you would obtain the information we would be
appreciative. Don't do it by telegraph or telephone. We'll make our
diplomatic pouch available to you." Sarnoff replied, "I'll talk to
Winterbottom. I don't see why we shouldn't do it." The documents do not
show that he did.
As it turned out, the final disconnection of the circuits only took
place because the South American governments willed it. There is no
evidence that ultimate action was taken by the State Department, RCA, or
British Cable and Wireless.
***
Sosthenes Behn, like Sarnoff, paradoxically showed great dedication to
the American war effort. On May 15, 1942, Behn announced to The New York
Times that the United States government could have free use of all ITT
patents and those of its subsidiaries, both in the United States and
abroad, for the duration of the war and six months thereafter. He would
not charge manufacturers engaged in the production of war equipment.
With a touch of black humor he told the Times that "We have 9,200
patents, and more than 450 trademarks in 61 countries, and about 5,100
patents and 40 trademark applications pending in 38 countries. These
figures do not include patents to German subsidiaries of the corporation
since information about them is not available." This barefaced lie was
published without demur in the Times.
Behn coolly announced that profits and losses of his international
corporations "and the accounts of German subsidiaries, Spanish
subsidiaries, the Shanghai telephone company ... and Mexican
subsidiaries" had not been included in the annual financial statements
for the same reason of "lack of information" -- information that was, in
fact, reaching him daily.
Amazingly, on April 21, 1943, Behn let the cat at least peep out of the
bag. He said, at an ITT shareholders' meeting in New York, "More than 61
percent of ITT's operations are in the Western hemisphere, almost 24
percent in the British Empire and neutral nations in Europe and less
than 13 percent in Axis or Axis-controlled countries. Most of the cash
available to the corporation originated with 'subsidiaries in the
Western hemisphere.'"
The announcement to the shareholders that 13 percent of ITT was held in
enemy territory caused not a ripple of surprise.
Despite the fact that all branches of American Intelligence were
monitoring Colonel Behn at every turn, intercepting his messages,
supplying unflattering memoranda marked "Confidential," and in general
knowing exactly what he was up to, nothing whatsoever was done to stop
him. As the war neared its end, whatever mild internal criticisms were
voiced within the American government were quickly silenced by the
prospects of peace with Germany and future plans to confront Russia. The
FBI released through its internal organization a number of detailed
reports on Behn forwarded to Navy, Army, and Air Force Intelligence. J.
Edgar Hoover linked Behn to Nazi sources, including agents in Cuba and
other parts of the Caribbean. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of
Behn's collusion in his files, Hoover was pleased to receive from Behn
the book Beyond Our Shores the World Shall Know Us, written with Behn's
cooperation in 1944 and dealing with the problem of providing adequate
American international broadcasting facilities. On June 17 of that year
Hoover wrote to Behn: "Your letter of June 10 ... has been received and
the book entitled Beyond Our Shores the World Shall Know Us has arrived.
I do want to express to you my heartfelt appreciation for your
thoughtfulness in making this splendid volume available."
Ironically, Behn's wartime headaches came not from Roosevelt but from
Hitler. During that last period of the war Behn's work on behalf of the
German army had deeply intensified. His communications systems for the
OKW, the High Command of the Nazi armed forces, had become more and more
sophisticated. The systems enabled the Nazis under Schellenberg's
special decoding branch to break the American diplomatic code. They also
allowed the building of intercept posts and platoons in the defensive
campaign against the British and American invasion of France. At the
same time, Behn was indispensable in making that invasion possible.
The problem was that the forces of anti-Behn were moving in under
Postminister Wilhelm Ohnesorge. Behn's associate, General Erich
Fellgiebel of the OKW, was prodded by the determination to bring about a
negotiated peace, and Schellenberg's efforts undoubtedly abetted him.
With Behn moving behind the scenes, and the assistance of John Foster
Dulles's brother, Allen Dulles, of the Schroder Bank and the OSS, the
famous generals' plot of July 1944 was hatched to assassinate Hitler.
When Fellgiebel hesitated in cutting off communications to Hitler's
headquarters after the bomb went off that almost killed the Fuhrer,
conversations were overheard by Hitler's spies that revealed the plot's
purpose. Ohnesorge's hour had arrived. In a desperate effort to save
himself from ruin or worse, Schellenberg turned against his fellow
conspirators and Himmler -- who had all along tacitly half-encouraged
Behn and the plotters -- was compelled to feed Fellgiebel to the wolves.
Fellgiebel and his associate in ITT, General Thiele were executed, and
Karl Lindemann of Standard Oil went to prison, narrowly escaping the
gallows. Only ITT's Gerhardt Westrick's hold over his fellow ITT board
member Schellenberg and close contacts with I.G. Farben saved Westrick
from a similar fate. Again, Behn's German empire very nearly was
confiscated by Postminister Wilhelm Ohnesorge, but Schellenberg took a
great risk and protected it once more.
On the day Paris was liberated, August 25, 1944, Behn drove in a jeep
down the Champs-Elysees in a new role: He was "special communications
expert for the Army of Occupation." His right-hand man, Kenneth
Stockton, who had remained joint chairman with Westrick of the Nazi
company throughout the war, was with him in the uniform of a three-star
brigadier general. Behn made sure in Paris that his collaborating staff
were not punished by Charles de Gaulle and the Free French. He was
helped at high army levels to protect his friends.
When Germany fell, Stockton, with Behn, commandeered urgently needed
trucks to travel into the Russian zone, remove machinery from ITT-owned
works and aircraft plants, and move them into the American zone.
In 1945 a special Senate committee was set up on the subject of
international communications. Completely unnoticed in the press, Burton
K. Wheeler, "reformed" now that Germany had lost the war, became
chairman. An immense dossier showing the extraordinary co-ownership with
German and Japanese companies of RCA and ITT was actually published as
an appendix to the hearings, but almost nobody took note of this
formidable and fascinating half-million-word transcript. Least of all
were its contents noted by the committee itself, which wasted the
public's money by simply discussing for days (with Fraternity figures
like James V. Forrestal) the possibility, quickly ruled out, of
centralizing American communications systems. There was not a mention
from beginning to end of the discussions of the questionable activities
of RCA and ITT chiefs. Yet, in a curious series of exchanges between
Wheeler and Rear Admiral Joseph R. Redman, who had been in charge of
Naval Communications during the early part of the war, the cat leaped
out of the bag in no uncertain manner. Apparently under the impression
that the hearings would never be published, Wheeler seriously sat and
talked of some of the reasons that such events had taken place. He asked
Redman the question, already knowing the answer, "To what extent has
American ownership of communications manufacturing companies in foreign
countries, such as Germany, Sweden, and Spain, been of advantage, if
any, to this country?" Redman replied, "Of course, from an economic
point of view, I am not qualified to say, but I would say this from
possibly a technical or research point of view, you get a cross-exchange
of information in the research laboratories."
This amazing revelation by a high personage won the response from
Wheeler, "And what about the disadvantages to us?" Redman replied
blandly, "While you are working on things here that are developed for
military reasons, there may be a certain amount of leakage back to
foreign fields."
Wheeler asked, "How could you keep a manufacturing plant in Germany or
in Spain or in Sweden, even though controlled by Western Electric from
exchanging information as to what they were doing?"
Redman replied, "Well, we have had to rely a great deal upon the
integrity of our commercial activities. Of course, if a man is a crook,
he is going to be a crook regardless of whether you set up restrictions
or not."
Wheeler said, "Let us suppose that you have a manufacturing company in
Germany and also one here, and they are owned by the same company,
aren't they exchanging information with reference to patents and
everything else? ... Admiral Redman, you are not naive enough to
believe, if a company has an establishment in Germany and another in
America, they are not both working to improve their patents, are they?"
Redman admitted, "No, sir."
Warming to his theme, Wheeler said, "Consequently, if there are private
companies that have factories over there and also here, they're bound to
exchange information. It seems to me this has been going on in all kinds
of industry. And that would be true of the electronics industry, or any
other manufacturing industry, and whether they have a medium for such
exchange in the nature of cartels or something else, they exchange
information. What check has the Navy made to find out whether or not
information is exchanged in that manner?"
Redman said, "We get a certain amount of information from captured
equipment, captured documents, and things like that, and can find out if
there is a leakage. ... Of course we have depended somewhat on our
foreign attaches to get us some information on these things. ... I do
not like here to get into a discussion of intelligence because I fear we
might get ourselves into trouble."
Wheeler said, "You might, but some of us don't feel that way about it."
"Perhaps not," Redman replied.
Wheeler continued, "We might get into trouble in the Senate, but they
cannot do anything about it. They cannot chop our heads off at the
moment."
Senator Homer Capehart added, "For at least six years."
On February 16, 1946, Major General Harry C. Ingles, Chief Signal
Officer of the U.S. Army, acting on behalf of President Truman,
presented the Medal of Merit, the nation's highest award to a civilian,
to Behn at 67 Broad Street, New York. As he pinned the medal on Colonel
Behn, Ingles said, "You are honored for exceptionally meritorious
conduct in the performance of outstanding service to the United States."
A few years later Behn received millions of dollars in compensation for
war damage to his German plants in 1944. Westrick had obtained an
equivalent amount from the Nazi government.
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