Latin America: Double Cross?

Down the swank Avenida Alvear marched two blue-uniformed police. Of all improbable places, they stopped at the home of Sr. Federico (Fritz) Mandl, Austrian-born, Argentine-naturalized munitions magnate, arrested him “by order of the President,” and whisked him off to Buenos Aires’ gloomy Grenadier’s Barracks. Simultaneously, the Government decreed the expropriation of IMPA, Mandl’s ambitious arms factory. It was the most astonishing event in Argentina’s busy week (see col. 1).

Fritz & Hedy. Fritz Mandl was the scion of Austria’s pre-Anschluss Hirtenberg Arms factory. In Vienna of the 1920’s he acquired notoriety as a young viveur who gambled for high stakes, and kept fancy apartments. His grande affaire was Second Wife Hedy Kiesler (Lamarr) of Ecstasy fame.

Even before Hedy went to Hollywood and divorced him, Fritz was immersed in the family arms business. His firm had a sharp reputation for circumventing the restrictions of the Allied Control Commissions. His own politics were opportunistic. Democracy, he said, “is a luxury that might be borne, perhaps, in prosperous periods.” He backed Prince Ernst Riidiger von Starhemberg and his fascist Home Guard, bet on Dollfuss and Mussolini to stave off Hitler. In 1937 he saw the handwriting on the wall, deftly transferred his holdings abroad.

Fritz & the Colonels. In the New World, Fritz Mandl operated with splashy grandeur. The closets of his Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Llao-Llao, and Mar del Plata establishments held 278 suits. His garages sheltered two Rolls-Royces, three Minervas and an Isotta-Fraschini. His parties featured double magnums of champagne and scarce green chartreuse.

With equal gaudiness, Fritz moved into the Argentine financial world. He gave interviews freely, talked of a big steel plant and a film company, bought into a rich shipping company, a plastics and metal plant.

When the Colonels staged their June 1943 revolution, Fritz polished his military contacts, wangled a reputed $50,000,000 munitions order. But the ex-Austrian was hobbled first by a materials shortage, later by U.S. and British blacklisting. President Edelmiro Farrell and Vice President Juan Peron, tired of Mandl’s steady drain on the Treasury, grew more & more dissatisfied with the trickle of cartridges, rifles, hand-grenades and gliders that came from the Mandl factory.

There was no official explanation for Fritz’s arrest last week. Cynics surmised a double cross, suggested that the Colonels had determined to take over Mandl’s factory by declaring him a “dangerous element.” Furthermore, his arrest might make good publicity in the U.S.