When Heinz L?ning posed as a Jewish refugee to spy for Hitler's
Abwehr espionage agency, he thought he had discovered the perfect
solution to his most pressing problem: how to avoid being drafted
into Hitler's army. L?ning was unsympathetic to Fascist ideology,
but the Nazis' tight control over exit visas gave him no chance to
escape Germany. He could enter Hitler's army either as a soldier...
or a spy. In 1941, he entered the Abwehr academy for spy training
and was given the code name "Lumann." Soon after, L?ning began the
service in Cuba that led to his ultimate fate of being the only
German spy executed in Latin America during World War II. L?ning
was not the only spy operating in Cuba at the time. Various Allied
spies labored in Havana; the FBI controlled eighteen Special
Intelligence Service operatives, and the British
counterintelligence section subchief Graham Greene supervised
Secret Intelligence Service agents; and Ernest Hemingway's private
agents supplied inflated and inaccurate information about
submarines and spies to the U.S. ambassador, Spruille Braden.
L?ning stumbled into this milieu of heightened suspicion and
intrigue. Poorly trained and awkward at his work, he gathered
little information worth reporting, was unable to build a working
radio and improperly mixed the formulas for his secret inks. L?ning
eventually was discovered by British postal censors and unwittingly
provided the inspiration for Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. In
chronicling L?ning's unlikely trajectory from a troubled life in
Germany to a Caribbean firing squad, Thomas D. Schoonover makes
brilliant use of untapped documentary sources to reveal the
workings of the famed Abwehr and the technical and social aspects
of L?ning's spycraft. Using archival sources from three continents,
Schoonover offers a narrative rich in atmospheric details to reveal
the political upheavals of the time, not only tracking L?ning's
activities but also explaining the broader trends in the region and
in local counterespionage. Schoonover argues that ambitious Cuban
and U.S. officials turned L?ning's capture into a grand victory.
For at least five months after L?ning's arrest, U.S. and Cuban
leaders -- J. Edgar Hoover, Fulgencio Batista, Nelson Rockefeller,
General Manuel Ben?tez, Ambassador Spruille Braden, and others --
treated L?ning as a dangerous, key figure for a Nazi espionage
network in the Gulf-Caribbean. They reworked his image from
low-level bumbler to master spy, using his capture for their own
political gain. In the sixty years since L?ning's execution, very
little has been written about Nazi espionage in Latin America,
partly due to the reticence of the U.S. government. Revealing these
new historical sources for the first time, Schoonover tells a
gripping story of L?ning's life and capture, suggesting that L?ning
was everyone's man in Havana but his own.
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