NORTHERN SPY SCARE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3899, 10 May 1937, Page 6

NORTHERN SPY SCARE

Europe’s latest spy stories are coming from a new source—the remote and lonely town of Boden, some fifty miles from the Arctic Circle, where Sweden has built a Gibraltar of her own, commanding both the Gulf of Bothnia and the land approaches from Finland. It is one of

the most secret fortresses in Europe, although its green painted gun turrets and its immense concrete bastions can be seen a long way off. Even the commander of its carefully picked garrison cannot pass its heavy iron gates without showing his identity papers. Foreigners are turned back by the special Swedish gendarmerie three miles from it. The latest arrest on a charge of espion-

age in the Boden area, according Norwegian papers, is that of a Russian artist named Betji, who was travelling on a Nansen refugee passport. Lapps who live in the Boden area and strangers who float down the Lule River past the fortress zone on timber rafts have figured in previous spjl reports. Boden has also been a prolific producer of the more usual type of pretty girl spy stories.