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In South America, Sosthenes Behn was in partnership (as well as
rivalry) with an even more powerful organism: the giant Radio
Corporation of America, which owned the NBC radio network. RCA
was in partnership before and after Pearl Harbor with British
Cable and Wireless; with Telefunken, the Nazi company; with Italcable,
wholly owned by the Mussolini government; and with Vichy's Compagnie
Generale, in an organization known as the Transradio Consortium,
with General Robert C. Davis, head of the New York Chapter of
the American Red Cross, as its chairman. In turn, RCA, British
Cable and Wireless, and the German and Italian companies had a
share with ITT in TTP (Telegrafica y Telefonica del Plata), an
Axis-controlled company providing telegraph and telephone service
between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Nazis in Montevideo could
telephone Buenos Aires through TTP without coming under the control
of either the state-owned system in Uruguay or the ITT system
in Argentina.
Messages, often dangerous to American security, were transmitted
directly to Berlin and Rome by Transradio. Another shareholder
was ITT's German "rival," Siemens, which linked cables
and networks with Behn south of Panama.
The head of RCA during World War II was Colonel David Sarnoff,
a stocky, square-set, determined man with a slow, subdued voice,
who came from Russia as an immigrant at the turn of the century
and began as a newspaper seller, messenger boy, and Marconi Wireless
operator. He became world famous in 1912, at the age of twenty-one,
as the young telegraph operator who first picked up word of the
sinking of the Titanic: for seventy-two hours he conducted ships
to the stricken vessel. He rose rapidly in the Marconi company,
from inspector to commercial manager in 1917. He became general
manager of RCA in 1922 at the age of thirty-one and president
just before he was 40. Under his inspired organization NBC inaugurated
network broadcasting and RCA and NBC became one of the most colossal
of the American multinational corporations, pioneers in television
and telecommunications.
After Pearl Harbor, Sarnoff cabled Roosevelt, "All of
our facilities and personnel are ready and at your instant service.
We await your command." Sarnoff played a crucial role, as
crucial as Behn's, in the U.S. war effort, and, like Behn, he
was given a colonelcy in the U.S. Signal Corps. He solved complex
problems, dealt with a maze of difficult requirements by the twelve
million members of the U.S. armed forces, and coordinated details
related to the Normandy landings. He prepared the whole printed
and electronic press-coverage of V-J day; in London in 1944, with
headquarters at Claridge's Hotel, he was Eisenhower's inspired
consultant and earned the Medal of Merit for his help in the occupation
of Europe.
Opening in 1943 with a chorus of praise from various generals,
the new RCA laboratories had proved to be indispensable in time
of war.
But the public, which thought of Sarnoff as a pillar of patriotism,
would have been astonished to learn of his partnership with the
enemy through Transradio and TTP. The British public, beleaguered
and bombed, would have been equally shocked to learn that British
Cable and Wireless, 10 percent owned by the British government,
and under virtual government control in wartime, was in fact also
in partnership with the Germans and Italians through the same
companies and proxies.
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Simultaneously, the Transradio stations, according to State Department
reports with the full knowledge of David Sarnoff, kept up a direct
line to Berlin. The amount of intelligence passed along the lines
can scarcely be calculated. The London office was in constant
touch with New York throughout the war, sifting through reports
from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile and sending company reports
to the Italian and German interests.
In a remarkable example of the pot calling the kettle black,
Nando Behn, the nephew of Sosthenes Behn, cabled his uncle from
Buenos Aires to New York on June 29, 1942: "It is about time
something is done down here to cut out the sole communication
center in the Americas with Berlin. Our competitors, Transradio,
have a direct radio circuit with Berlin and you can be pretty
sure that every sailing from Buenos Aires is in Berlin before
the ship is out of sight."
General Robert C. Davis never seemed to question the fact
that his Swedish fellow board members were proxies of an enemy
government. Nor that secret documents, charts, and patents were
being transferred with speed, accuracy, and secrecy, with the
authorization of the Japanese Minister of Communications, to South
America direct.
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On the day Paris was liberated, August 25, 1944, Behn drove in
a jeep down the Champs-Elysees in a new role: He was "special
communications
expert for the Army of Occupation." His right-hand man, Kenneth
Stockton,
who had remained joint chairman with Westrick
of the Nazi company throughout the war, was with him in the uniform
of a three-star brigadier general. Behn made sure in Paris that
his collaborating
staff were not punished by Charles de Gaulle
and the Free French. He was helped at high army levels to protect
his friends.
When Germany fell, Stockton, with Behn, commandeered urgently
needed
trucks to travel into the Russian zone, remove machinery
from ITT-owned works and aircraft plants-and move them into the
American zone.
In 1945 a special Senate committee was set up on the subject
of international communications. Completely unnoticed in the press,
Burton K. Wheeler, "reformed" now that Germany had lost
the war, became chairman. An immense dossier showing the extraordinary
co-ownership with German and Japanese companies of RCA and ITT
was
actually published as an appendix to the hearings, but almost
nobody took
note of this formidable and fascinating half-million-word transcript.
Least
of all were its contents noted by the committee
itself, which wasted the public's money by simply discussing for
days (with Fraternity figures like James V. Forrestal) the possibility,
quickly ruled out, of centralizing American communications systems.