Hitler’s Man in Havana: Heinz Lning and Nazi Espionage in Latin America

Schoonover, professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette, charts the brief career of the “minor and ineffective” Nazi spy Heinz Lüning, whose arrest and subsequent execution were “hyped and distorted” by Cuban, American and British officials as a major coup for the Allies. Sent to Cuba to collect information concerning Allied naval maneuvers and commerce in the Caribbean, Lüning was a drinker and a womanizer with “a brief training period, narrow and personal interests, modest intelligence, and no desire to serve Germany.” The story of how this hapless, largely incompetent man found his way to the Americas and, eventually, the international limelight is at once strange, humorous and pathetic, if drily rendered. The final chapter, in which Schoonover makes a case for Lüning as the model for the character James Wormold in Graham Greene’s 1958 novel, Our Man in Havana , is somewhat disconnected from the preceding sections, though it’s a provocative if unusual conclusion to what is otherwise a straightforward work of military history. 32 photos. (Sept.)