SPY MANIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 November 1929, Page 7

SPY MANIA

BALKAN COUNTRIES IN THROES. A wave of spy mania has been sweeping over the Balkans, says the Vienna correspondent of the “New York Times.” None of the States which compose this uneasy corner of the world is free from it, but it has engulfed Czecho-Slovakia. When Premier Francis Uzdral was succeeded as Minister of War by M. Visokvsky recently, the Hungarian and German newspapers sardonically expressed the hope that the new Minister would free his country from the espionage complex which had made it appear “as though all the secret war plans of Europe} were in the safe of the Czecho-Slovak War Department.” Spies, as remarked before in this correspondence, are nothing in the Balkans. Everybody expects to be spied upon an some way or another. In Austria letters bearing any evidence of relating to money matters are read by income-tax officials in the fond hope of thereby unearthing some secret source of income the author has concealed from the authorities. Journalists telephoning to London or Paris news of the affray at St. Lorenzen, which started the recent state of tension between the Socialists and the Heimwehr, were consistently made aware of the presence on the line of “listeners-in” who wished to discover what the outside world was being told about the affair.

That sort of domestic espionage, almost a part of daily life in the Balkans, creates no special comment. It may be seen in its most acute pitch just now in Yugoslavia. There the honest citizen sits in cafes and sups his coffee and talks of anything and everything but the dictatorship, because he is not sure that the man with whom he is conversing, although a friend yesterday, may not have become a spy today. Failing that, the waiter who serves him may overhear an incautious word, the usual sequel being a denunciation, not as a foe of dictatorship, but as a Communist, the evidence complete, if necessary, with “planted” Communist documents. Even this sort of espionage, although annoying, is still the home article, and as such is accepted more or less phlegmatically by the public. It is when your Balkan citizen suspects he is being spied upon, not by his own fellow-nationals, but by the subjects of a neighbour country, that he loses his sense of proportion. There is the case of the Czecho-Slovak officer, Captain Falout, who left a suitcase in a Berlin-Prague airplane. The bag was delivered to the police, opened by mistake and the contents revealed a captain of the General Staff as a spy. Now his defending attorney, Dr. Mellan, is to be tried for acting contrary to the regulations for the safety of the State.

OFFER TO PAY FOR DEFENCE. It: seems that some days after Captain Falout’s arrest a. German couple appeared at Dr. Mellan’s office and offered him £ 400 for Captain Falout s defence. Dr. Mellan refused the money l?ut did not immediately inform the police of the offer, with the result that the police were unable to arrest the pair, whom they suspect of having been German accomplices of the accused. So Dr. Mellan, too, must stand his trial, cheered by the recollection of the 19-year sentence imposed on his former client, with its special piovisions for solitary confinement the first and sixth months of each year, and a monthly fast day and confinement in a dark cell every 28th day of September. Far more tragic was the arrest ot a young Austrian holidaying pair, Norbert Boehm, of Graz, and his fiancee, Grete Steindl. While in the Czechoslovak city of Maerisch-Neuvatz they committed the heinous offenceof photographing its railway station. When they were arrested they were- found to have no passports —a damning “proof” of gualt sufficient to keep them in prison six months. After that time their innocence had been clearly demonstrated and an order issued for their release.

Ou the very eve of being released Boehm was killed by a fellow prisoner in a quarrel over a cigarette.

- The slayer defended himself on the ground that he had only killed a foe of the Czecho-Slovak people. When Grete Steindl learned of her lover’s death she tried to hang herself in prison, but was saved. She assured her captors, however, that on her release she would make a more successful attempt, urging as a reason that spy mania had left hex- nothing to live for.

No one knows how many more innocent persons are at this moment pacing their cells in the prisons of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia while the police seek evidence to convict them of espionage. The very air breathes of suspicion, and rumours of plots and secret armaments are on all men’s mouths. It was only two months ago that the arrest of a Czech railway official at the Hungarian frontier* station of Hidasnemti on a charge of spying dislocated international railway traffic and led to an exchange of diplomatic notes between the governments concerned. A court-martial sentenced the official, M. Pecha, to five years’ imprisonment. Czechoslovakia's reply was to pass' a similar sentence last week on a Hungarian subject, Peter Ekmesz, for espionage, and a sevenyear sentence upon another’ Hungarian, Joseph Paa, for stealing the plans of the fortress Theresienstadt and selling them to Hungary.

Hungary their Vent one better by arresting five men, whose names were not made known, on a charge of trying to break into the municipal building in Satoralja-Ujhely and stealing documents of military value. Czecho-Slovakia wall no doubt retort in kind. It is a meiTy game fox’ the police, but not amusing for the minorities who have to live, breathe, have theii’ being and keep out of gaol in the countries which play it.