Bloody Prologue
Until June 28, 1914, it was unthinkable that a Bosnian-Serbian teenager with a Browning handgun and seven bullets could somehow affect the lives of millions of people in the Americas. Neither the teenager—a tubercular waif named Gavrilo Princip—nor the six other assassins in his Sarajevo cell could have comprehended why or how the murders of an Austro-Hungarian archduke and his pregnant wife—Franz Ferdinand and Sophie—would stir political and economic winds in the Western Hemisphere. Even Colonel Dragutin T. Dimitrijević, head of Serbian Military Intelligence and the ambitious handler of the Belgrade terrorist organization that trained and armed the assassins, would have scoffed at the idea that Princip’s seven bullets could ignite a haphazard chain of powerful political events almost half a world away.
Franz Ferdinand and Sophie's killings sent Europe’s major powers careening brashly into a war that had been openly predicted for years. Overconfident hawks in each belligerent country had dreamed of the conflict. As combatants mobilized armies and fleets in Europe and in European colonies around the globe, they also scurried to activate intelligence networks worldwide. Although Latin America’s political landscape was unusually and deceptively tranquil in 1914, European newcomers to the intelligence battlefield there found that it was far from empty after a century of civil wars, invasions, interventions, political strife and warlordism. |
Blood-sucking Weasels and Lautaro Lodge
Spying was an established profession in Latin America centuries before the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors arrived. Intelligence played a pivotal role in the Conquest. Generations later, secret revolutionary organizations infiltrated Spain’s American colonial administrations and led the colonies in revolt. |
Bloody Independence and the Culture of Secrecy
Sebastian Francisco de Miranda, the godfather of Latin American revolution and independence, died in a Spanish prison, forsaken by his heirs, an unfortunate victim of the fear and suspicion that readily breeds in a culture of secrecy. Independence did not bring tranquility. Warfare was pervasive, sparked by racial animosity, violence between separatists and centralists, boundary disputes, territorial conquest, intervention to collect debts, envy of a neighbor’s natural resources, religious enmity, political conflict between Conservative and Liberal ideologues, |