SECRET AGENT

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 160, 3 April 1937, Page 10 (Supplement)

SECRET AGENT

Dramatic Incidents in the Life of a Spy Through the capitals and ports and fortresses of Europe, jostling among the peaceful citizens in the streets, move unrecognised the secret agents of the great Powers, figures beloved of novelists, yet in actuality every whit as romantic as the novelists make them out: to be. To obtain information, every nation employs its secret service, and in peace and in war the life of a spy is a hazardous and exciting employment. To lie, steal, bribe, kill without a second’s hesitation, are part of the everyday job of a secret agent.

A secret agent must have no friend, nor wife, nor love. He must trust no one. He must be able to drive a car, fly an aeroplane, sail a boat, ride a horse, and excel at walking, running, mountaineering, ski-ing. swimming, and, not the least important, shooting. Wrestling, boxing, jiu-jitsu, all the arts of self-defence, are essential to him. His life may depend on them. His mental abilities, like his physical, must far exceed those of the average mau. He must be not merely at home with, but a master of. at least four languages. He must have intimate knowledge of the military geography of the great Powers, must be familiar with their politics and policies, must know their laws and their customs. He must possess an unfailing memory, not only for facts but for laces. And above all, he must curb his speech as rigidly as a Trappist monk.

Finally, he must have profound skill with certain lethal weapons, sandbag and weighted cane, brass knuckles, and life preserver, pistol and knife, the deadly hypodermic needle loaded with prussic acid, poison-hnpregnated thorns prepared by Amazon natives, one prick of which is followed by instantaneous paralysis and rapid death.

Here are some true incidents in the life of a spy, confessed to Henry Wysluim Lanier, a writer in “Harper’s Magazine”: Once, in a foreign town, it was his assignment to locate the secret controlroom whence the great lock-gates of one of Europe’s most impregnable fortresses were opened to turn the naval might of a nation loose upon the high seas. Once located, that control-room, the heart of the whole naval base, might be destroyed by a single wellplaced bomb. To ascertain its where-' abouts, the secret agent had to slip unseen through a cordon of sentries, swim out to tlie great lock-gates, wait wet and frozen clinging to the cold steel walks until a ship passed through the lock, and observe what happened. In a dimly-lighted chamber close to the water’s edge an officer was handling levers. From his movements the spy learned what he wished. Then be swam back to shore, ran the gauntlet of the sentries and so escaped with a valued official secret. Another adventure was when, to obtain the latest military codes, he burgled a foreign War Office. After three months’ spying, disguised as a window cleaner, he discovered in which safe the papers were concealed. With a professional safe-cracker he set to work, by the faint glimmer of a candle. Suddenly the latch clicked, and, as the safe-breakers turned pistol in hand, an officer stepped into the room. The two spies leapt on him. but not before he had caught up a weapon and struck one of them down. But the other landed a single disabling blow’. Then a prick with a poisoned thorn, and, not even pausing to watch him die, the two returned to the opening of the safe. Before dawn a fast ear was carrying them across the frontier with the precious documents. Of such incidents is the life of a | sp.v composed.