NAVY SCANDAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 227, 25 September 1929, Page 7

NAVY SCANDAL.

AMERICAN SENSATION

Alleged Receipt Of Secret

British Document.

INPLUENCE IN UNITED STATES,

(Australia" Press Assn.—United Service.)

(Received 10 a.m.) WASHINGTON, September 24. A letter by William Shearer, observer for American shipbuilders at the 1927 Geneva Conference, claiming" that a secret British document, ■n-hich j ie obtained, influenced the legislative course of the fifteen-cruiser construction bill in the Senate last session was read into the record on Tuesday of the Senate Investigating Committee.

In the letter addressed to Mr. Homer 1 Fe'-'g ll3oll ' president of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Corporation, last March, shortly after the Cruiser Bill'was passed, Shearer wrote that he realised the serious opposition that confronted the programme and that funds might not be appropriated. The clause requiring the start of construction by a given time had been eliminated, and the number of cruisers mHit be : reduced. He said this opposition came from the highest authority in the land, including the Secretary of State all of the internationalists and the so-called pacifist bodies.

"As you are aware I was the possessor o f a secret British document so vital and amazing in its construction that I took it to the Navy Department, where, under the highest authorities, the document was photographed on that same evening and a photostat copy was handed to me.

"I immediately placed it in the hands of.a United States Senator and the Press. ■ This nation reflected the power of hie voice when it referred to hi.s speech for the cruisers as the greatest speech ever made in the United States for national defence. Nor did that senator hesitate to brand the opposition as. traitors," he wrote.