Spying – Old Magazine Articles

The Japanese Spy Problem
(American Legion Magazine, 1939)

“At the end of last year, our authorities discovered that there were nearly one hundred Japanese leg men in New England reporting to the Boston office. More than five hundred in Washington; something above two hundred in Chicago; twenty-five hundred were in the New York area; twenty-five in Cleveland; thirty-eight in Detroit; eighty-odd in Florida, and so on out to the West Coast where around three thousand Japanese are ‘on duty’ from San Diego to Port Washington.”

Detroit Spy-Ring Exposed
(PM Tabloid, 1943)

Here is told the tale of Countess Grace Buchanan-Dineen, a Detroit hostess and amateur Nazi spy. She was posted to Motor City in order to report on all the goings-on there to her pals in Berlin. The FBI turned her shortly after her her arrest and she began spying for them.

Nazi Spy Master
(Liberty Magazine, 1942)

This is a profile of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (1887 – 1945), Hitler’s man in charge of sabotage and espionage. It tells the story of what he was up to during the First World War and throughout the Twenties; how he greased the wheels in Belgium, Norway, Denmark and France to make the invasion of those nations a bit easier. It explains how impressed Hitler was with his abilities and how suspicious Himmler was at the same time.

The Nazi Spy Factories
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

“From businesslike German schools come the professional spy and the saboteur – cunning, ruthless, superbly trained for their specific tasks. They’ll be hard to stop, says Mr. Hoover, and catching them – in time – is a job in which every American can give the FBI a hand.”

Enemy Agents Sought Weather Info
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

Before the era of the World Wide Web, intelligence agencies had to rely on their own flunkies to gather all meteorological information they could find about a particular weather system; this explains why so many Axis spies were found with weather data among their possessions.

Listening-In On The Enemy
(Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

The FBIS – short for Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service – is the organization that listens to the world’s radios for Uncle Sam. It’s monitoring station in Washington has, besides editors and annalists, some sixty fantastic linguists on its staff – people who are fluent at anywhere from three or four – up to a couple of dozen, languages apiece. Their job is to intercept and translate the shortwave broadcasts of Rome, Berlin, Vichy and a score of lesser stations, which daily pour out Axis propaganda in more languages than were ever spoken in the Tower of babel.

A Busy Year for the FBI
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

The FBI had been tangling Axis spies throughout the mid-to-late Thirties, but with the December 8, 1941, declaration of war the FBI was emboldened with far greater powers. This explains why Director Hoover exclaimed that his agency had just completed the busiest year in its history.

‘No More Pearl Harbors”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1946)

When the twenty-year-old editor at Yank Magazine wrote this editorial at the close of W.W. II he was expressing a belief that was shared equally with the members of the W.W. I generation who prosecuted and managed the war from Washington – and that was an understanding that the world is a far more dangerous place than we thought it was and it needs to be watched. This 1946 article is similar to other columns that appeared in 1947 (when the CIA was established) and 1952 (when the NSA opened its doors) in that it announced the creation of a government agency intent on global espionage in order to have done with all future concerns that another Pearl Harbor was in the planning.

Saboteurs to be Tried in Military Court
(PM Tabloid & Yank Magazine, 1942)

The eight Nazi agents, who landed from U-boats on the shores of of Long Island and Florida, planning to cripple American war production, are in jail here [Washington, D.C.] under heavy guard, awaiting military trial on four charges that carry the death penalty.

O.S.S. Agents Executed by General Anton Dostler
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

On the evening of March 26, 1944, fifteen O.S.S. agents were executed following a failed raid on Italian soil to blow-up an Axis railroad tunnel. The sabotage mission was in support of the allied attack taking place further south at Monte Cassino (Battle of Monte Cassino, January 17, 1944 – May 19, 1944) and had the tunnel been successfully blown, supplies to the defending Germans would have been cut off.

This YANK article reported on the first war crime trial of the post World War Two era: the trial of German General Anton Dostler (1891 – 1945), who gave the order to execute the O.S.S. prisoners. In his defense, General Dostler insisted that he was acting under the orders of General Gustav von Zangen, who denied the claim.