Book description
When Heinz Lüning 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. Lüning 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, Lüning 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. Lüning 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. Lüning 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. Lüning eventually was discovered by British postal censors
and unwittingly provided the inspiration for Graham Greene's Our Man in
Havana. In chronicling Lüning'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 Lüning'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 Lüning'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 Lüning's capture into a grand victory. For at least
five months after Lüning's arrest, U. S. and Cuban leaders-J. Edgar
Hoover, Fulgencio Batista, Nelson Rockefeller, General Manuel Benítez,
Ambassador Spruille Braden, and others-treated Lüning 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 Lüning'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 Lüning's life and capture, suggesting that Lüning was
everyone's man in Havana but his own. Thomas D. Schoonover is
professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette. He is the author of eight books, including Uncle Sam's War of
1898 and the Origins of Globalization, The Banana Men, and Germany in
Central America.
