Like every other FBI agent nationwide and in the New York district, Anderson was alerted by headquarters to expect heightened activity by Axis spies. German, Italian and Japanese diplomats or known sympathizers were top priority over any other suspects. He had already been specifically ordered to curtail the heavy surveillance of Soviet diplomats in July and August, which he found strange, to concentrate exclusively on Axis nationals. Anderson reassigned the three man team watching the Consulate General of the USSR to the Italians and their sympathizers. The Germans were already well covered and the Japanese were considered the least dangerous of the three. Within days long transcripts of telephone conversations began streaming in, faster than they could be processed and filed let alone analyzed in detail. Most of the talk sounded innocuous until one particular recording caught the attention of an FBI recorder who raised some questions. It had been taped at the Taft Hotel on Seventh Avenue just a few hours earlier:
Female voice: “I love you…I will not accept being separated from you again.”
Male voice: “I may have to leave very soon…once…but we can’t talk here…”
Female: “What do you mean, how they can listen in…”
Shuffling sounds and a tapping of a metal object.
Female: “Even if it’s not used…? Oh I can’t believe it…!”
Male: “paper and pencil only…”
The agent in charge specified that the man was identified as Vittorio Barbieri, Consul General of Italy, and the woman as Maria Nicolosi. Anderson didn’t like the words: “I may have to leave very soon” coming from a diplomat who had just returned to the very prestigious New York posting, far more important than the previous job he held in Newark only a year before. He drafted all this in a memorandum to Marvin Tucker with a recommendation that Maria Nicolosi be questioned as quickly as possible to ‘jugulate’, as he put it, whatever embryonic network existed. But Tucker was not impressed, seeing no real urgency; he preferred to increase surveillance in the expectation of catching many more fish…
By the end of October Maria was being closely shadowed by several FBI agents but she proved to have become much more cautious and nothing tangible surfaced other than a few cryptic remarks by the Consul General during their almost daily and rather energetic love trysts.
Several times a day messengers of all kinds arrived at the Isle of Capri restaurant disguised as delivery boys or customers to drop off the latest movements taking place in New York harbor. Maria would then batch the information and deliver it herself to the Consul general in one of many hotel rooms they used for their love making. This activity however never became apparent to the FBI that felt those private sessions were all genuine and not the occasion for any espionage activity. Had Anderson been able to read other reports from French and British military intelligence he would have found out how Italian naval espionage often used sex as a very effective ‘cover’ for its many successful operations.