A 1939 magazine article that reported on the assorted activities of Japanese spies operating around the Tijuana/San Diego region (their presence was well-documented by the Mexican military in addition to the F.B.I.).
A year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Naval Intelligence sold a Japanese agent some bogus plans of the naval installation - more about this can be read here.
"Following swiftly on the smashing of a spy ring in this country, a Federal grand jury in Brooklyn, N.Y., last week leveled a unique indictment at the government of Nazi Germany: it baldly accused the Third Reich of conducting, in ten countries stretching from Peru to China, a worldwide espionage plot directed against the United States."
J. Edgar Hoover tells how this ring was broken up in this 1951 article...
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. "Suddenly last June, a Federal grand jury in New York City hoisted the curtain on 'America's most significant spy prosecution since the [First] World War' by indicting 18 persons for participating in a conspiracy to steal U.S. defense secrets for Germany. Subsequently, only four of the 18 could be found for trial. The others, including two high officials of the German War Ministry, were safe in - or had escaped to - the Fatherland." 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.
This is the story of Harry Sawyer (real name William G. Sebold), a German immigrant to American shores. On a return trip to Germany to visit family in 1939, Sawyer was very reluctantly forced into service as a spy for the German SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the intelligence arm of Himmler's SS. Sawyer was schooled briefly in the ways of spying, told what was expected of him and then let loose to set sail home.
Upon his return, Sawyer quickly explained his problem to J. Edgar Hoover, who masterfully turned the situation to his advantage, an advantage that led to the capture of 32 Nazi spies.
Click here to read about "Lucy" - Stalin's top spy during the Second World War. | 
