It was under the operational control of Section D (4) from the Foreign Security Service (Ausland-SD), and was primarily concerned with the collection and transmission of clandestine information from Latin America to Europe.

Overall, the Germans were successful in establishing a secret radio communications network from their control station in Argentina, as well as a courier system involving the use of Spanish merchant vessels for the shipment of paper-form intelligence.

[1][2] It also had the effect of swaying key power brokers of the region out of neutrality and into the American sphere, namely Mexico and Brazil, but also strategically positioned nations producing much needed goods such as Venezuela (oil), Chile (copper), Peru (cotton) and Colombia (platinum).

Johannes Siegfried Becker (codename: Sargo) was the main figure in the operation and the man personally responsible for organizing most of the intelligence gathering in Latin America.

Becker and Lange were soon discovered by Argentine authorities, so they moved their operations to Brazil, where they met with Gustav Albrecht Engels (Alfredo), another German spy and the owner of the General Electric Company in Krefeld.

One of the Abwehr spies in the United States that frequently traveled to Brazil to speak with Engels was Dušan Popov (Ivan), who was one of the most successful British double agents during the war.

Lange, Hartmuth, and Franczok, who airmailed one transmitter to Paraguay before leaving Brazil, established a temporary station at Asunción, and reestablished contact with Berlin.

After receiving Becker's orders, Franczok moved to the new control station in Buenos Aires in May 1943, Lange proceeded to Chile, and Hartmuth was left in Paraguay.

Von Heyer's cover was his job with the Theodore Wille Company, several of whose employees were involved in another spy net centered on station CIT in Recife.

When von Bohlen went back to Germany late in 1943, his group was sufficiently well organized so that he could leave it, as well as a large sum of money and equipment, in the hands of Bernardo Timmerman, who carried on until his arrest in February 1944.

[2] Between 1940 and 1942, Nicolaus organized an extensive network which maintained contact with other spy rings in South America and attempted to obtain information from the United States.

[4][5] In spite of his lack of competence, after his premature arrest in August 1942, Allied officials, including President Fulgencio Batista, General Manuel Benítez, J. Edgar Hoover, and Nelson Rockefeller, attempted to fabricate a link between Lüning and the German submarines operating in the Caribbean, claiming that he was in contact with them via radio, to provide the public with an explanation for their failures early in the U-boat campaign.

[1] The plan was to have two agents named Hansen (Cojiba) and Schroell (Valiente) deliver the supplies to Buenos Aires via ship, and then travel to Mexico, where they would build a transmitter for communicating with the control station in Argentina.

Allied intelligence knew of the plan through intercepts, so in August 1944, shortly after Hansen and Schroell arrived in country, most of the German agents were arrested by Argentine authorities, permanently ending all effective espionage activity by Department VID 4 in the Western Hemisphere.

The Germans that managed to escape continued to conduct minor espionage operations in Latin America until the end of the war in 1945, but never again did the amount of clandestine radio traffic return to its former level.

Bolívar agents were able to provide reports on the movements of merchant shipping and on local political developments, but the traffic was probably more useful to the Allies than it was to the Germans, because it did reveal the identities of collaborators in the South American countries, including a former Argentine minister of marine and the head of the Paraguayan Air Force.

[1] In addition to revealing the identities of German spies and sympathizers, the interception of clandestine traffic allowed the Allies to maintain continuity on the agents operating in the Western Hemisphere.

As a consequence, when the SS Cabo de Hornos, aboard which Hellmuth was traveling to Spain, made a routine stop at Trinidad, British authorities arrested him.

In early 1946, when the State Department was preparing a case against the Peronista government of Argentina regarding its wartime support of the Axis, it requested permission to use clandestine Bolívar information, which had been intercepted by Allied intelligence, as part of its evidence.

[1] This article incorporates public domain material from Cryptologic Aspects of German Intelligence Activities in South America during World War II (PDF).