AGENT OF GERMANY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 109, 4 November 1939, Page 15

AGENT OF GERMANY

BROADCASTS IN ENGLISH •

DISCHARGED SPY CONVICT

(By Air Mail—From "The Post's" . London • Representative.)

LONDON, October 6.

Norman Baillie-Stewart, the . "Officer in the Tower," who in 1933 was caught betraying British military secrets to .Germany, is now broadcasting propaganda in English from a German wireless station.

This former lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders, who was sentenced to five years' penal servitude and cashiered- from the Army, was reported in August, 1937, to have left England and to be making his future home abroad.

In a letter to a friend in London was this sentence: "As you know, my sympathies have always been elsewhere than in England, and I am now going to put them to some constructive purpose." Soon afterwards, in a series of articles published under his name, Bail-lie-Stewart wrote of his long-standing German sympathies, of his work as a spy under a Berlin agent, and of visits to Germany when on leave from Aldershot.

Baillie-Stewart was aged 24 when, on January" 20, 1933, he was arrested and put in the Tower of London. For weeks the identity of "The Officer.in the Tower" was unknown to the general public. Then his name was revealed and on March 20 his trial by general court-martial began at the Duke of York's headquarters. The trial lasted seven days, There were ten charges and Baillie-Stewart pleaded not jfuilty to all. He was found guilty of seven. They alleged that he collected at Aldershot information about tanks, armoured cars, and other military matters, and sent it to a German.

There were many references during the hearing to a girl who signed herself "Marie Louise." It was alleged that two letters from her contained "the reward of ignominy."

Baiiiie-Stewart pleaded that she was infatuated with him and had given him money. After. the trial, however, he stated in his articles, that "Marie, Louise" never existed.

: Major Shapcqtt, the prosecuting pfflcer, said that tne case against Baillie* Stewart was that, he had ''sold his country fpr £50—- and some more,"

Baillje-Stewart- \vag released from Maidstone Gaol in January, 1937—having earned good*conduct remission—in time to attend the funeral of his father, Liqut-Colonel C. H. Paillie-Wright. Baillie-Stewart had changed his name by deed poll some years before.