SECRET SERVICE

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 August 1927, Page 12

SECRET SERVICE

OPERATIONS IN GERMANY. SYDNEY, July 25. Speaking to members of the Legacy Club, Captain J. S. Hunter, gave some interesting details of the working of the British secret service in Germany, both during the war and since. He himself, he said, had often feigned deafness for 24 hours, and total blindness for two days, had been “married” (for official purposes only), and had been provided with “brothers” and “sisters,” in the pursuance of this work. During the war over a thousand men and a hundred women were engaged in carrying information across the border (generally through Holland); the salaries bill each week exceeded £78.000, and other expenses reach £75,000. Until 1917 Holland was the -easiest route to and from Germany, but in that year the regulations for transit were made so severe that travellers were even subjected to acid baths in order to ensure that they did not carry cypher messages written In invisible ink about their persons. The Berlin beer-gardens had always been a favorite place for gaining information. Any scraps that might be picked up in conversation there were quickly memorised and conveyed to “headquarters” at Potsdam, right in the thick of the enemy’s organisation. Secret service agents had also to travel many thousands of miles by railway. The value of pices of information gleaned in this way could be exampled by the fact that one of the first hints of an impending shortage of glycerine came from a notice in a German railway carriage, requesting passengers to leave the stones and pips of any fruit they ate at a station, so that- they might be treated by a chemical process and. glycerine extracted from them. ’ The Germans made no secret during the war of the extent to which they used the factories of Switzerland. Trains used to run across the border labelled quite openly, “To Switzerland; goods to be converted into war material,” and run back labelled, “War material, from Switzerland.”