German Clandestine Activities in South America in World War II

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sequence of events rather than by any definite plan that the Coast Guard worked more
closely with ONI than with ONC from June 1941 to February 1942. 54
During 1940 and 1941, the Coast Guard also received miscellaneous intercepted
traffic from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC, in addition to
performing its statutory regulatory duties, began in 1940 to be active in providing the
armed forces with copy of the traffic of"suspect" transmitters. In late July of that year,
Commander J.F. Farley, the Communications Officer ofthe Coast Guard, requested FCC
monitoring of certain unidentified transmitters operating on the high frequency band;
those using callsigns with the pattern "lTLE," "2TLE," etc., and possibly sending five-letter
encrypted traffic. The tasking was implemented and in October, Farley expressed the
Coast Guard's appreciation and requested that the assignment be continued.55
The Federal Communications Commission (1911-1941)
The earliest known attempts by the United States to monitor radio communications
had their inception in 1911. Under the Radio Act of 24 June 1910, radio jurisdiction was
placed in the Department ofCommerce and Labor, and a Radio Service was organized in
that Department on 1 July 1911. When the Department was split in 1913, supervision of
the provisions of the Radio Acts of 1910 and 1912 went to the Department of Commerce.
The duties of the Radio Division included inspecting radio stations, examining radio
operators, determining the power of radio stations, and conducting investigations of
interstation interference. The Radio Division maintained a central monitoring station at
Grand Island, Nebraska; nine secondary monitoring stations; and six mobile units,
mounted on trucks, for field investigations. These mobile units were capable of acting as
mobile direction finding (DF) units.
In 1932, Congress proposed that the President be authorized to transfer the duties,
powers, and functions of the Radio Division of the Department of Commerce to the
Federal Radio Commission, where it became the Division of Field Operations. When the
Federal Communications Commission assumed the property of the Federal Radio
Commission in 1934, the Division of Field Operations became the Field Division. Under
the FCC, radio monitoring activities were expanded. The number of mobile monitoring
stations designed primarily for measuring the field strength of stations but adaptable for
DF and other field work, was raised to nine. Monitoring transmissions, identifying
stations, and supplying intercepts to interested government agencies continued. Various
changes, extensions, and improvements in FCC radio monitoring activities were made in
ensuing years, and the Department of Justice, the Coast Guard, the State Department,
and the Army and Navy came to place varying degrees of reliance upon the FCC in
matters involving illicit use ofradio.56
In September 1940, J. Edgar Hoover queried the possibility ofthe FCC monitoring all
long-distance telephone calls between New York and Germany, France, and Italy. He
also suggested that since Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Soviet officials were
sending both foreign language and encrypted communications via cable, it might be well
for the FCC to obtain copies of all encrypted and unencrypted communications which
might have a bearing on our national defense problems. These suggestions created legal
and administrative problems for the FCC, and at Chairman James L. Fly's request, a
meeting was held in January 1941 between the FBI and the FCC's Chief Engineer and
General Counsel to iron out the problems.57
The FBI was interested in all communications between the Western Hemisphere and
Germany, and in December 1940 requested that the FCC cover the Chapultepec, Mexico,
commercial transmitter for ten days as "information [had] been received from a confiden-
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