STORY OF THE WAR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20721, 14 November 1930, Page 11

STORY OF THE WAR.

AUSTRALIAN'S GREAT COUP. GERMAN PLOTTERS EXPOSED, [from our own correspondent.] NEW YORK, Oct. 15. How a great wartime coup was effected by an Australian in the United States is recalled by the death of Captain Boy-Ed, naval attache to the German Embassy at Washington in tho early period of the war. He was the late John Rathom, at I that time editor of the Providence Journal. Mr. Rathom was chiefly instrumental in exposing Boy-Ed and his partner/ in anti-British activities, Captain Von' Papen, the military attache. His publication of articles in the Journal, which were widely copied throughout the Unitod States, did much to provoke slow American wrath against the German propagandists. Real evidence against the pair of Washington plotters was found in the confession of a German reservist, one Stegler, who said that Boy-Ed was the director of a, ring whose business was to get German reservists into England, where they would act as spies. This was done by the i ' issue of false passports, which guaranteed that the spies were reputable American citizens. Carl Hans Lody, one of the most notorious of German spies, was thus enabled to reach England, where his career was cut short by a firing squad at the Tower of London. Boy-Ed's activities, of which the late Mr. Rathom became aware bv some means which were not divulged, gradually brought demands for his recall which became intense at the time the Lusitania was sunk, for Boy-Ed lacked the good sense to remain silent in this crisis. In 1919 Boy-Ed wrote a book about th# war, called "The Plotter," and in this his wartime experiences in Washington were | recounted. He expressed a desire to revisit America, but the Federal Government declined to allow him to enter, though his wife, whom'he married in 1920, returned to her native land. She was the daughter of the late Bishop MackaySmith, of the episcopal diocese of Pennsyt vania.