Commander Sinclair McFarlane was handed a ‘raw’ intercept that morning with the notation that it was encrypted in an unbroken Italian naval code. The interesting part was that it appeared to be urgent and used a frequency powerful enough to reach North America, in fact it could easily be pinpointed to the Italian consulate in New York City. McFarlane reviewed recent coded messages having some resemblance to the sample. He went back several months and found only three messages in a different code that could possibly match a small number of unexplained incidents involving German, Italian, Japanese and even Spanish naval activity. It was at that point that he stumbled almost by accident on a secret report from a U.S. Vice Consul in Casablanca, Kenneth Davis recounting incidents observed at the military airport in Tetouan, Spanish Morocco. After several days of research McFarlane asked the FBI if they had anything in their files relating to three Italian four engine P.108T planes. The result was unclear. The planes were known to have flown to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands then three days later there were rumors of a four engine plane crashing minutes after takeoff in the ocean near Conakry in French West Africa but there were no survivors. Clearly the planes didn’t have the range to fly from Las Palmas to the United States even with enhanced fuel supplies but they could possibly make it to South America. The only way to find out was a time consuming effort to locate by elimination any potential landing sites.
Plotting a possible course with an Army Air Force navigation officer McFarlane concluded that the best place to land had to be northern Brazil. Argentina, the best friend of the Axis in the hemisphere, was 2,000 miles out of range. There was no available intelligence on Italian P.108T planes using non-Italian markings landing in Brazil in August. They clearly had not landed on any commercial airfields plus he felt that even if they did fly from Conakry to near Recife they would necessarily have immediately headed south to the General Peron’s welcoming regime. The results of his investigation remained negative: no planes of that type bearing Italian commercial airline LATI markings, or of any other airline had landed in Recife, Natal, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Mar del Plata and not in Paraguay either during the time period. So the question of four engine transports landing anywhere in Brazil remained unanswered. The country was so immense that a simple jungle clearing could be used almost anywhere…
The FBI promised to keep searching for any clues. One month later, just before Christmas, a hint from French counter espionage reached the U.S. Legation in Tangier regarding three four engine aircraft refueling in Las Palmas. The spotter in question couldn’t identify the type of plane. McFarlane found that an experimental Italian bomber still in the testing stages could also be fitted as a transport. There were few details about the engines but clearly it was meant to handle long range missions and could be fitted with additional fuel tanks. With a reasonable load the planes could hop across the water and in good weather make it to northern Brazil. The amount of fuel they would have had to load at Conakry was the best way to measure the distance they had to cover. The investigation in West Africa turned out to be extremely slow with multiple administrative obstacles hindering any flow of information. McFarlane finally dropped that angle as no one in Conakry was able to provide meaningful information about the crash or the landing and take off of the planes.
Then a few weeks before Pearl Harbor McFarlane was unexpectedly appointed head of security for the Third Naval District that consisted mainly of New York Harbor and any New Jersey piers as far down as Elizabeth. The investigation into the planes taking off from Africa was passed on to his replacement. But by the end of the first week America was at war with the Axis and Commander McFarlane was suddenly overwhelmed by a tremendous load of urgent tasks, among them the need to set up a whole new office for the area under his command. The aftermath of Pearl Harbor was also a nightmare at ONI for anyone associated to the Pacific desk. The angry president ordered lists of officers and sailors to be immediately reassigned to remote areas in an effort to protect the administration from the expected congressional inquiries.
McFarlane had always worked on East coast security issues and had been passed over for promotion twice in recent years mainly due to the bad blood of words he had with a senior officer who was now a casualty of Pearl Harbor “lack of preparedness” as it was being called. His promotion to chief of security for the Third Naval District came as a prelude to a jump in rank, or so he hoped.