THE STORY OF “K”

Evening Star, Issue 23136, 9 December 1938, Page 1

THE STORY OF “K”

A SPY ARB A MYSTERY The story of Mata Hari, classic of our feminine spy series, slowly staled because whole libraries of research piled upon her grave-revealed too muen about the unhappy woman, says the New York ‘ Times.’ This will never be true of “ K,” whoso execution before a Soviet firing squad was recently announced. _ , (, TT- |, * One fascinating glimpse of K is all we shall ever have, one brief sketch in ‘Red Star,’ official organ-of Russia’s army. But it will remain the sublimation of all spy thrillers. ‘ K was of extraordinary beauty. _ Naturally. Her ancestry, too, was distinguished though bourgeois. Daughter of a hardfisted capitalist, a gold mine owner m the far fringes of Siberia, she fled the Revolution as the 17-year-old wife of a worthless White Guards officer. Deserted in Harbin, the bewildered child was forced to become a cafe dancer and entertainer. Yet, though the toast of the town, she hungered for gold and revenge against the Red Fatherland. Inevitably she fell a prey to the suave and sinister agents of Nippon. Marrying a Soviet citizen at their instigation, she wormed her way across the continent and entered, the service of Nicholai Petrovich, a spy master spinning an unseen web as an obscure bookkeeper on a State farm. “ K|s ” second husband conveniently died, whereupon , she promptly bewitched a high, though unnamed, Soviet executive. This marriage enabled her to creep like a serpent into a nest of innocent birds as secretary to the Personnel Bureau of the Minitary Institute itself. There, in the midst of her machinations, she was trapped. Poor “K’’ 1 It happens that her secret arrest and liquidation coincide with a furious Red drive against the blandishments of lady spies. (Russia, as everybody knows, is full of them. But who could have suspected so perfect a temptress writhing in the very heart of the soldier’s citadel? Who, indeed! Surely none but the most voracious devourers of romantic fiction could wonder if “K” had an actual existence. So they alone can be sure they will meet her again and again, beautiful and beguiling, in the pages of E. Phillips Oppenheim and his imitators everywhere. The rest of us will never know.