Becker arrived in Buenos Aires with the trunk in December 1940 and was intercepted at the German embassy, where the ambassador opened the trunk, saw the bombs, imagined the diplomatic headaches they would cause, and ordered Becker to dump the bombs in the river. At this point, he abandoned the sabotage mission and began building his new spy network in earnest, traveling across the continent, from Argentina to Brazil to Bolivia to Paraguay, trying to convince German colonists to spy for the Führer. Many of the would-be V-men in South America proved hopelessly ineffectual—one was
