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. - from Amazon:
 "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." 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." From the 1940 editorial pages of PM came this column by Henry Paynter (1899 - 1960) who wrote amusingly about the many frustrations facing Japanese spies in North America.
"The identity of almost every Japanese spy or saboteur has been known to U.S. authorities. Every instruction they have received or sent has been decoded..."
At the height of their irritation, they confided in the German Consul-General stationed in San Francisco - only to learn after the war that he was an FBI informant (you can read about him here). "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." Here is an interesting article by an American counter-espionage agent who tells several stories about the various Japanese spies he had encountered during the early months of the war. He wrote of his his frustrations with the civil liberty laws that were in place to protect both citizen and alien alike.
It was Mexican president Manuel Avila Camacho who chased the spies out of his nation - click here to read about it...
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