ENGLAND'S SECRETS.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 46, 23 February 1929, Page 16

ENGLAND'S SECRETS.

HOW THEY ARE KEPT. JOB OF SCOTLAND YARD'S SPECIALS. SIR W. CHILD'S RETIREMENT. SHERLOCK HOLMES IN REAL LIFE,

(By 0. PATRICK THOMPSON)

Scotland Yard has lo3t its own Sherlock Holmes—and England's secret police force is losing a chief whose name for sven years has resounded through the spy jungle like the growl of a maneating tiger. The man, in each ease, is Sir Wvndham Childs.

Childs lias been Assistant Commissioner and head of the Criminal Investigation Department and the Special Branch (England does not like the term "secret police"; hence the euphemism) sincce 1921. He is retiring now—a little disagreement with the Home Secretary on the subject of reorganisation and the powers and methods of his Department.

The underworld is considerably more interested in his departure than in the ; change in the chief commissionership. f (Sir William Horwood resigned following ! the celebrated Savidge petting-in-the- , park ease and was succeeded by the 1 Canadians' old war commander, Lard ' Byng). For the Chief Commissioner is concerned only with the general control and administration of London's 20,000 , police, whereas the Assistant Commis- ' sioner can (and Childs did) take an active hand in the technical processes which result in apprehensions, convictions and gaolings or executions. One could etch many pictures Jllus- , trating the formidable powers of the human lynx who controlled the C.I.D. and the counter espionage forces from a small bare office high up under the roof at Scotland Yard. Two will do: Under the Microscope. A lean, very spare man, with tired lines under almond eyes, sita with his eye glued to a microscope. On the table lie three queerly misshapen lead pellets —bullets that have struck living bone and subsequently been extracted from a corpse. Also a brass cartridge case. The microscope man has fired over three thousand bulleta from a variety of revolvers into blocks of wood and examined the result to gun barrel and bullet. This takes time. Time being precious, he has fired and peered, peered and fired, day and night. He has made several discoveries. • One is that the bullets are not all the same type. Another is that they come lroit two guns, not one. A third is that one of the bullets has been propelled by black powder instead of the customary cordite. And now the patient investigator knows that when he finds the guns which fired the shots he will be able to establish to the satisfaction of any jury that the bullets could have been fired' from those guns and no others. Eight months later two men • are arrested on'a car theft charge. Guns and cartridges found in their homes are brought to the little room. Again the lean man becomes abnormally active. The microscope again, the'bullets, the cartridge case, and this time —the guns. A charge of murder fallows against the two men. They are found guilty and hanged. The main link in the evidence which convinces the jury is that which connects the men with the guns, and the guns with the bullets and the cartridge case —evidence collected 60 patiently by the man with the microscope and' the expert knowledge of firearms and how lead bullets behave when they impact upon a tough thing like skull bone. At nightfall the lean man goes to his home in a quiet country cottage once occupied by a notorious highwayman. He stuffs an old pipe, smiles at his wife, and begins to draw the bow over the worn strings of a beloved violin. . • This may sound like Holmes, but as a matter of fact it is Childs', the supersleuth, in the most sensational murder mystery of 1927-28. But for his work the criminals might have escaped the noose for want. of conclusive evidence. It is a nice point, over which criminologists lately have argued, whether this piece of work was more or less remarkable than any other little masterpiece of Childs —the so-called pattern ■ clue. Pattern of the Shots. A man has been killed with a sporting ' gun. Tho sleuths were at a loss. Childs examined the pattern of the shots on the body, related that pattern to all known ■ types of sporting gun, narrowed the search to one type, and drew conclusions , which when tested led to the arrest and [ conviction of the murderer. A strange man. He is fifty-two now, stringy and sinewy, tanned by an outdoor iife. He was a lawyer, became a I fighting soldier, toward the end of the ; Great War was assistant adjutant- ; general, and retired from the army to 1 Scotland Yard in 1921. All that was known about him then was that he was a firearms expert, had been nicknamed "Fido" by hia brother ofiicers and "Tommy's Friend" by the rank-and-file (he got the men Christmas leave), and had as fine a flow of language on occasion as any man in the British army. His flair for police work was an agreeable surprise at the Yard and a disagreeable surprise in the underworld and the spy jungles. Some military men translated to the police are not so useful. Childs was vote'd the calmest and most acute chief the Special Branch had known since its formation. The Special Branch has varied and delicate duties. It conducts counterespionage, getting advice of all known or suspected secret agents arriving in the island, and shadowing them. _It wktches and reports on revolutionaries. It guards high personages. It contacts when necessary with the secret intelligence services of the War Office and the Admiralty (the Foreign Office also has its official information service). In general it is responsible for safeguarding the State from hidden enemies within and secret agents without. A good war-time example of bow the information net brings in fish who would otherwise escape is the so-called cigarcode spy case. In this instance Scotland Yard aiul the Admiralty co-operated. The Admiralty was worried about the uncanny knowledge the German Admiralty liaS of the movements of British warships in and out of a number of ports. The Special Branch got busy. The information net brought in, among other news items, one showing ; that an unusual number of Dutch com- . meroial travellers, with passports and papers in order, had arrived in England 1 j aTl 'l were doing a remarkable business in 1 cigars.

Two of the bunch, Haicke Petrus Marinus Janssen and Wilhelm Johannes Roos, were sending telegrams to Holland containing orders for cigars. The telegrams on file were collected and taken to Scotland Yard. The secret police observed with interest that the demand for cigars in the chief ports was most unusual, orders for 10,000 and 5000 being wired to Holland almost daily.

A Special Branch man went down ana had a look at the.Jiead office of the cigar firm. It was a back room in a shady quarter. Watchers were posted. It was found that a mysterious foreigner visited the office daily. But concrete evidence was still elusive.

Janssen and Roos were grabbed separately and brought to the Yard The chief of the Special Branch had the two men held in different rooms. Janssen was brought in.

"I suppose you uon't know r. man called Koos!" asked the Special Branch chief.

The Dutchman shook his head. He had never heard the name before. Roos was immediately marched in. The expressions of the two as they confronted each other were enough. They were searched. Codes found on them revealed that an order'for 5000 cigars sent from a port meant that five cruisers were lying there. A cancellation wire meant that so many had moved out. And so on. (Germany got no more information of British fleet movements through the cigar channel.) Any Time They Are Wanted. There are always a number of secret agents knocking about England. The secret police usually know most of the things about them, and could grab them if the word came. The word does not come in most cases, either for the lack of the evidence necessary to convict, or because the secret service has its own lieasons for giving them rope.

Nothing happens unless the spy gets really dangerous. A report is made, the spy's record is examined, and he is watched.

Everything he does is known. He is played like a fish. Often he plays his "victim's" • game without knowing it Papers are placed in his way. He pays good coin of the realm—his realm—for documents which are entirely misleading. Highly placed parsonages perusing them with interest in their rooms _in War Offices, Admiralties and Foreign Offices abroad are occasionally misled, but, being intelligent men, they more often call in the secret service chief and say hard things about his agents: and presently another unlucky spy finds himself off a pay roll. One secret agent of a foreign power was at work in England for some months last year before the Special Branch stepped in and fixed him. He could have been taken and deported at any time in that period, but the secret police wero interested and let him go ahead. Presently he made his blunder and gave the counter espionage far more important fish. He succeeded in buying an Englishman who was in a position to betray important naval secrets. The Englishman involved two others. The Special Branch waited until papers and money passed. Then they went down and collected their man. lhe chief traitor, an ex-officer with ft good war record, got ten years. _ At the moment the efficiency thaJ every one formerly praised has pome under a rapid fire of public and political criticism in England. It is said that there are too many agents provocateurs tempting saloon and club owners to break liquor regulations in order to get the evidence to grab them, too many spies and informers in the field of ordinary police work, too many ruses used to obtain information, too many liberties taken with the free citizen when inquiries are on hand, too many plain clothes patrols conducting espionage work in the parks —in short, that there is a secret police air about the whole of the police organisation and that it won't do. It is also suggested that the two departments, hitherto under one directing hand, should be separated, on the ground that secret police work is api to give a man a certain mentality and outlook, and that this mentality and outlook carried into the field of ordinary police work produces unhealthy results. Judgment on this matter probably will not be forthcoming until the Royal Commission which is now investigating the whole question of police powers and methods in England .reports, a year hence.