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By Root 2770 0

reported efforts to penetrate the German embassy in Buenos Aires, ‘hoping to make contact with’ an embassy telephonist ‘through the German mistress of a well known Englishman’ in the city. None of these individuals would necessarily have been aware of SIS’s interest, and, indeed, if they were, it might have made it more difficult to exploit them for intelligence purposes. From within the sizeable local Ukrainian community ‘reliable and sound information’ had also been obtained about German efforts to persuade them ‘to become Nazi-minded’. Using press and shipping-office sources, Miller was ‘receiving copies of the majority of the neutral shipping passenger lists, and through [agent] 75141 and his contacts we are able to obtain very accurate details of outgoing passengers and both in-coming and outgoing cargoes of a suspicious nature’. Miller emphasised that collating this material was quite a challenge. ‘The sorting of masses of trivial information,’ he wrote, ‘the card-indexing of hundreds of names, a daily report of two or three pages to me, the typing out of passenger lists, the translation of data received in Spanish and, in fact, the hundred and one details inherent in any form of widespread organisation, all take up considerable time.’

‘Purple primers’, collating SIS’s information about suspected enemy agents, were prepared for many neutral countries. This extract is from the Brazil volume.

One result of this kind of work – repeated in station after station – was the so-called ‘purple primers’ (after the colour of their binding), country-by-country lists of enemy personnel, of which a number have survived in the archives. In a Uruguay example of October 1943 individuals were classified under five headings: A – ‘Known and suspect espionage agents’; B – ‘Known and suspect agents, informants and sub-agents’; C – ‘Axis or pro-Axis persons using prominent positions as cover for subversive activities’; D – ‘Persons acting on behalf of enemy interests’; and E – ‘suspect fifth columnists’. In the first two categories were ‘all our registered XB cases’ (counter-espionage targets), while the other classifications ‘deal with persons who we believe either give assistance to them or who themselves are in line for a higher classification’. Of 174 people in the Uruguay primer, fifteen were in category A and thirty-eight in category B. By contrast, a December 1943 primer for Brazil included 238 category A people, though unlike the Uruguay volume it listed a large number who had been tried and convicted of espionage in the local courts. They did things differently in Peru where the primer was divided up into subject categories, such as ‘Commercial espionage’, ‘Gestapo’, ‘Peruvian Axis collaborators’, ‘Sabotage’ and so on. Reflecting the success of both Allied and indigenous efforts to curtail Axis activities in the country, the Lima station reported that, of eighty-seven subjects identified in 1941, forty-three had been ‘deported or repatriated’.

Other work in South America shaded into special operations territory, and here lines were sometimes crossed with operations run out of 48000 in New York. In March 1941 the SIS representative in Rio de Janeiro (where a separate station had been established in April 1940) complained to London that an officer, ‘Agent 75265’, had been sent to him from New York to ‘be employed by me and at the same time undertake work for 48,000 of nature of which I am ignorant’. Agent 75265, in fact, was involved in a proposed SOE operation to sabotage the Italian airline LATI (Linee Aeree Transcontinentali Italiane) which operated between Italy and Brazil. The service was regarded as a major loophole in the British blockade of Nazi-occupied Europe, carrying ‘German and Italian diplomatic bags, couriers, agents, diamonds, platinum, mica, Bayer chemicals, propaganda films, books and all sorts of men and materials back and forth over the route’. In part because one of the Brazilian President Vargas’s sons-in-law was chief technical director of the airline, the Brazilians refused to restrict LATI in any way.