Court v. Embassy

A slippery spy was John Jacob Napp, who kept a Buenos Aires waterfront saloon. Arrested, he sang on his boss as well as his subordinates (TIME, Dec. 28) and last week furnished Argentina's Supreme Court with evidence necessary to open legal proceedings against German Naval Attache Captain Dietrich Niebuhr. At the request of the Court, the Foreign Office demanded that the German Embassy waive Niebuhr's diplomatic immunity and permit him to stand trial.

This put the German Embassy in a hole. If the Embassy agreed, Niebuhr's conviction seemed inevitable; if it refused, the spying captain would be self-convicted by implication, and would probably have to sit in the safety of the extraterritorial German Embassy for the duration. In either case, Niebuhr would be of no further use as a spy.

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