In May 1985 the FBI uncovered a spy ring that had been operating since 1967. Four Americans with between them access to an enormous range of US Naval secrets had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to spy for the Soviet Union. The Griffin Interrogator is fictional but based on real technology of the period, technology the US considered secret but which it transpired had been comprehensively betrayed to the Russians.
The character of the arms-dealing war criminal Adolpho da Costa Martines is fictional but in part I drew on the post-war story of the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ Klaus Barbie.
Barbie was in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon and responsible for the deaths of around 14 000 in his cells or deported to concentration camps. He personally tortured hundreds to death in indescribably sadistic ways. He was arrested after the war by the British and passed on to the US Army Counterintelligence Corps. Despite being sentenced to death in absentia by a French court the US authorities refused to hand him over to France and instead arranged a new life for him in Bolivia as an arms dealer and spy for both the American CIA and West German BND.
In 1972 the French media discovered his whereabouts and France demanded his extradition. Due to Barbie’s close connections with the Bolivian military these demands were rejected. In 1980 Barbie feared that a new government might accede to the French demands and in July allegedly participated in the so-called Cocaine Coup, a short-lived military coup by extreme right-wing officers supported by the CIA and funded by local drugs barons. In 1983 a newly elected democratic government finally arrested Barbie and he was extradited to France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1991.
Most of the Nazi war criminals who used the so-called ‘ratlines’, often travelling on identity papers provided by sympathisers in the Vatican, went to Argentina but up to 2 000 started new lives in Brazil. The most infamous was Doctor Josef Mengele, who had performed barbaric experiments on inmates at Auschwitz, and who drowned off a Brazilian beach in 1979.
Israeli agents actively pursued such men. Most famously Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina in 1960 and subsequently tried and executed in Israel. In Brazil at the time of this novel the Israelis were hard on the trail of Gustav Wagner, one of the most sadistic of all the concentration camp commanders. He was eventually arrested in 1978 and subjected to extradition requests by Israel, Poland, West Germany and Austria. The Brazilian authorities rejected all the requests and Wagner was released. In October 1980 he was found dead in Sao Paulo with a knife in his chest.