| 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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