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Much of the ongoing struggle during World War II in Latin America between the intelligence organizations of the Axis and the Allies still remains veiled in secrecy. The single most important studies of the subject by Stanley Hilton and Ronald Newton concentrated on Brazil and Argentina, respectively. Thomas Schoonover's relatively short volume about a German spy in Cuba supports the general scholarly view that often the Allies overestimated both the extent and effectiveness of Nazi intelligence activity in the Americas. Using extensive archival and other sources from Germany, Great Britain, Cuba, and the United States, Schoonover provides a meticulously documented account of the blundering and failed activity of the German Abwehr (intelligence) agent, Heinz Lüning, in Havana. Lüning, trained for six months at the Abwehr post in Hamburg, arrived in Cuba in September 1941 and, after routine and unsuccessful spying, was arrested in August 1942.
At the time of his capture by Cuban authorities, the Allies considered Lüning "a master spy and the most important spy captured in the Western Hemisphere" (p. 11). Initially, the FBI overseas, the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), believed that Lüning headed an espionage network that aided German U-boat successes in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. By late 1942, according to Schoonover, the submarine activity was devastating Allied shipping. The Allies, he notes, "had legitimate concerns about...