SECRET SERVICE AGENT.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 4 May 1937, Page 6

SECRET SERVICE AGENT.

REAL LIFE INCIDENTS. 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 war hhe 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 man. He must be not merely at home with, but a master of, a least four languages. He must have intimate knowledge of the great Powers, must be familiar with their politics and policies, must know their laws and their customs. He must possesse an unfailing memory, not only for facts but for faces. And above all, he must curb his speech as rigidly as a Trappist monk. Finally, he must have profound ski’d 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-impregnated 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 Wysham 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 whereabouts, the secret agent had to slip unseen through a cordon of sentries, swim out to thq great lock-gates, wait wet and frozen clinging to cold steel walls until a ship passed through the lock, and observe what happened. In a dimly-lighted chamber close to the water’s edge am officer was handling levers. From his movements the spy learned what he wished. Then he 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 sale the papers were concealed. With ' a professional safe-breaker ihe 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 re turned to the opening of the safe. Before dawn a fast car was carrying them across th-e frontier with the precious documents.

Of such incidents is the life of a spy composed. _