Detonator & Dream

When fire broke out on two more nitrate-carrying steamers last week, two tenuous theories went up in smoke. Neither Japs nor Reds could be blamed for the plague of nitrate-ship fires (TIME, April 2) after Chile's cocky counter-espionage Departamento 50 nabbed the chief saboteur, a German named Julio Alberto von Appen Oestmann (alias Apfel), and turned him over for shipment to the U.S.

The detained detonator, a marine inspector of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, became chief Nazi saboteur for Chile and Peru in 1939. Last month, when Chile took real steps toward war with Germany, he and his operatives glided into action with time bombs neatly plopped into the holds of nitrate ships. Their score to date: five ships fired, 102 lives taken.

Departamento 50 also revealed a dream of the chief saboteur that never came off: to destroy the Panama Canal by exploding a Chilean ship in one of the locks.

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