SECRET ARMIES
68
and Exporters, the same
organization under a slightly changed name. Wakabayashi
checked into the cool and spacious Hotel Tivoli, run by the
of the Federation of Japanese Importers
United States Government on Canal Zone territory and, pro
by the guardian wings of the somewhat sleepy American
Eagle, washed up and made a beeline for the Boyd Bros, office,
where he was closeted with the general manager for over an hour.
Wakabayashi s business interests ranged from taking pictures
of the Canal in specially chartered planes, to negotiating for
manganese deposits and attempting to establish an "experimental
station to grow cotton in Costa Rica."
tected
The big manganese-and-cotton-photographer man fluttered all
over Central and South America, always with his camera. One
week he was in San
Jose",
special flight to Bogota,
back to
Costa Rica; the next he made a hurried
Colombia (November 12, 1937) then
Panama and Costa
Costa Rica
;
Rica.
He
finally got permission
to establish his experimental station.
from
In obtaining that concession he was aided by Giuseppe Sotanis,
an
Italian
his coat,
gentleman wearing the fascist insignia in the lapel of
he met at the Gran Hotel in San Jose. Sotanis,
whom
Italian artillery officer, is a nattily dressed, slender man
in his early forties who apparently does nothing in San Jose ex
cept study his immaculate finger nails, drink Scotch-and-sodas,
A former
stamps and vanish every few months only to reappear
again,
studying his immaculate finger nails. It was Sotanis
collect
still
who arranged for Nicaragua to get the shipment of arms and
munitions which I mentioned earlier.
This uncommunicative Italian stamp collector paved the way
Wakabayashi to meet Raul Gurdian, the Costa Rican Min
for
and Ramon Madrigal, Vice-president of the
government-owned National Bank and a prominent Costa Rican
ister
of Finance,
merchant. Shortly after Costa Rica gave Wakabayashi permission
to experiment with his cotton growing, both the Minister of