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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 ltalcable, 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 (Telegraifica 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.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Hans Blume, manager of Transradio in Chile, set up an
arrangement in connection with his related clandestine station, PYL, to transmit Nazi
propaganda, coordinate espionage routes, give ship arrivals and departures, supply
information on U.S. military aid, U.S. exports, the Latin American defense measures, and set
up communications with German embassies throughout South America. Transradio was
equally active in Rio and Buenos Aires.
In Brazil, Transradio was known as Radiobras, its mixed American, British, Nazi, and Italian
shares permanently deposited in -- of course -- the National City Bank of New York in Rio. Its
directors were American, Italian, German, and French. Transradio's London bank transferred
as much as a quarter of a million shares of Transradio stock from Nazi-controlled banks to the
National City Bank branch in 1942.
In Argentina the board was again a mixture of Nazi, Italian, and Allied members. Like the
members of the Bank for International Settlements, though with even less excuse, the directors
sat around a table discussing the future of Fascist alliances. So extreme was the situation that
many messages could not be sent to Allied capitals by U.S. embassies or consulates without
going through Axis hands first.
On March 15, 1942, Transradio in London instructed its Buenos Aires branch to open a radio-
photograph circuit to Tokyo. Since British post office authorities were in charge of British Cable
and Wireless's wartime operations, the British government was presumed to have authorized
this act. On March 16 the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires reported to the State Department in
Washington that the opening of the radio-photograph circuit "would appear to offer the
Japanese opportunity of transmitting news photos unfavorable to the united nations to Buenos
Aires for distribution here and in other countries."
On March 16, Thomas Burke of the State Department sent a note to State's Breckinridge Long
saying, over three months after Pearl Harbor, "Now that we are at war and parties to
Resolution XL of the Rio Conference, it seems proper to require our companies to desist from
carrying any Axis traffic in the other American republics. It is our understanding in this
connection that the Treasury Department in the future will require licenses of American
communications companies desiring to carry traffic of this nature. ... As far as the past is
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