“Technical advantages played a big role in the undercover struggles,” Rout and Bratzel concluded in 1986’s The Shadow War. “Technical brilliance in cryptography and radio interception plus hard work by field agents proved to be the unbeatable combination which made victory possible.” The two historians credited the FBI for both the fieldwork and the technical brilliance (the coast guard’s files were classified at the time), and authors of more recent books have also praised the bureau for destroying the Nazi networks in South America. But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t
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