One on the House

Through the doors of the Colonial waterfront saloon in Buenos Aires wandered sea-weary Allied seamen whose nerves twitched from the strain of dodging torpedoes on the stormy Atlantic. The patron, John Jacob Napp, was obliging, forever setting up drinks on the house and volunteering those bits of information and guidance so prized by sailors in strange ports. Napp was a good listener, too, and sometimes the seamen talked.

When they did, it was never long before someone slipped into a phone booth and called Captain Dietrich Niebuhr, naval attache of the German Embassy. "My cousin is on the Gneisenau" he would say, and the clever captain would know he was talking to an agent with valuable information. When the merchant ships put to sea they ran into Nazi U-boats with uncanny regularity. Many were sunk. Napp received 400 pesos a month and expense money, and he earned his pay many times over.

When Napp and 37 other secret Axis agents were arrested (TIME, Dec. 14), it looked as though Argentine authorities were really going to clean Axis spies out of the capital. The Government had limited Axis diplomatic-code cables to 100 words a day, and the Argentine press played up testimony on the activities of the spy ring which left no doubt in the minds of Argentines. The well documented memoranda of U.S. Ambassador Norman Armour (TIME, Nov. 16) seemed to have been taken seriously and in good faith.

But last week:

> German Embassy officials, confining themselves to 100 words in code daily, made use of the services of the Spanish, Bulgarian and other Axis-dominated diplomatic missions in Buenos Aires to send messages to Germany.

> Five of the six accused ringleaders were released on a paltry 2,000 pesos (about $500) bail.

> The trial of the spies was, for some unexplained reason, delayed.

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