ENEMY WITHIN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 174, 25 July 1942, Page 4

ENEMY WITHIN

GOSSIP HELPS SPIES

CAMPAIGN FOR SECURITY

"It is useless to think that because this is Australia there are no enemy agents here. They are here, and curiosity and idle talk by the public are making their job 100 per cent easier." This is a paragraph from army publicity matter issued for the Security Campaign," writes a staff correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald. It should be remembered that Canberra recently announced, "The monitoring of enemy broadcasts has now established to the Government's satisfaction that Berlin, as well as Tokyo, is making use of information gathered by spies within Australia, and sent out of the Commonwealth by short-wave radio." Perhaps no one is foolish enough to tell all the facts he knows in conversation or a letter, but one scrap of infQrmation collected here, another hint dropped there, picked up by different agents, and all collated at a central clearing house, may well paint a complete picture, and tell the "Japanese gentleman" all he wants to know. Bombing raids are not made until all the necessary information to guide aircraft to their objectives is available. "Secret" Mssion to Malaya A secret mission to Malaya by high Australian officials, the failure °f which was bz-oadcast by Tokyo radio before Singapore fell, caused grave disquiet about leakage of confidential information. So secret was this mission that some officials believe that only the decoding by the Japanese of radio messages referring to it could explain the leakage. That it is officially regarded as possible for an enemy agent to send messages by secret radio without being detected is shown by the finding by the New Zealand Royal Commission which investigated the sinking in the southern Pacific in November, 1940, of the vessels Rangitane, Holmwood, Komata and Vinni. «rrX he confusion's report stated: The possibility of an undetected illicit wireless transmission from New Zealand cannot be dismissed, despite official vigilance." It was recently reported in Australia that an Italian had been arrested because he had had in his possession a radio receiver disguised as a clock. An expert radio engineer could easily construct a transmitter disguised equally as well, capable of communicating with, say, a submarine off the coast. Even if he were overheard transmitting, his object would have been achieved if his message got away. Carelessness a Crime Examples have been quoted this week in the army's security campaign of how carelessness may cause disaster, for example, the dropping of uncensored letters overboard from an Australian troopship which together would give all the information an enemy would want about the convoy; the gossip at a dinner in London which caused the failure of the Dakar expedition; vague allusions which an Italian mother wrote to one son about another which enabled the R.A.F. to bomb an Italian tank works.

The army tells also of a woman in Australia who in a letter decribed an imaginary air-raid on her own city and included the positions of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns for "local colour." In 1940 Liuetenant-General Miles, at that time G.0.C., Eastern Command. expressed concern at the leakage of information about troopships. He went so far as to circulate a letter to staff officers warning them about speaking too openly, even to their wives. Much has happened in, and near, Australia since then. Military officers recall that a man in close touch with troop movements was told the precise destination of a convoy by his wife's laundress, a former ship's stewardess. Cases have been reported in which members of the Merchant Navy have asked girl friends to write to them and have named certain ports. Children who have overheard indiscreet discussions of "secret" information by their fathers and mothers have innocently repeated it to their playmates, and so another "secret" has leaked out. Spies and Embarked People were once inclined to discard as fantastic the idea that spies might be landed and embarked in secret on the Australian coast, but it does not seem so fantastic now, for Japanese submarines have been in Sydney harbdur, and organised gangs of saboteurs have landed on the coast of the United States. The submarines and the saboteurs were

detected, but there may have been other submarines and other sabotage gangs.

The efficiency of enemy espionage is shown by the priceless story told about the visit of the President of France, M. Lebrun, to the front line. Only members of the French Cabinet and high police. and army officers were supposed to know about it. M. Lebrun took a look through an observation hole at the German positions. The first thing he saw was a notice in French, "Welcome to the President of the French Republic." Australians must realise that the war is here, that this country is a potential battlefield. Naturally, relatives want to know where their boys are, and in some cases there are ways of finding out But they should remember that if they learn where their boys are the Japanese have every chance of learning it also. Victoria Barracks receive an average of 60 to 70 telephone calls a day from people wanting the telephone numbers of units all over New South Wales and other areas. They become indignant when the army will not tell them. Mysterious Lights Appear A.I.F. officers who saw service abroad have plenty of stories of how enemy attacks were aided by a fifth column—stories of lights which mysteriously appeared at vital points in a black-out when enemy bombers were overhead, of bombs falling on secret aerodromes almost before they were built, of marks painted on roofs, and other ingenious signals calculated to defeat all security precautions.

An A.I.F. man invalided home 12 months ago said that his unit heard Lord Haw Haw announce over a German radio that the A.I.F. would break camp at 11.30 on a certain night in the next week. As it happened, the Australians broke camp at 11.15, and 15 minutes later German bombers blasted their camp to bits.

These incidents occurred overseas, but it was in Australia that farewell telegrams arrived from Adelaide for soldiers who had been training in Sydney for months, on the very day that their troopship sailed. It was from Australia that lettters were addressed by relatives to A.I.F. men at ports overseas at which their transports were scheduled to call. It was in Australia, last September, that references to troopships, convoys, and defence matters were excised from more than 10,000 letters from New South Wales in three weeks.

i< wonder that the army says Australia must become war conscious."