WOMAN SPY’S END

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 852, 21 December 1929, Page 28

WOMAN SPY’S END

DYING s IN SANATORIUM

Under an assumed name, oue of the most picturesque and daring woman spies of the Great War is facing death in a Swiss sanatorium, according to reports in Paris, says a Paris correspondent of the “Evening Standard.”

Intelligence services of the Allied armies knew her under various names. She Iras chosen a new one tor her headstone, and at the sanatorium they call her by it. Flaunting a defiant mask of anonymity, she penetrated into the enemies’ citadels and always escaped. Her clever boldness won her the title of the “Phar.tom Spy.” Her physical likeness to a phantom is said to have been caused by her surrender to morphine and opium. New she is seriously ill. The daughter of a Jewish art dealer, she lived in a mansion near a fashionable Berlin park. Patient years at the. University of Berlin gave her a command of five languages and a profound historical background. Her debut as a spy was a pre-war accident, according to the most widely repeated story.

While travelling in Russia with her father she became enamoured of a military attache at the German Embassy at St. Petersburg, who desired to obtain confidential information about a big munitions factory. She visited the home of a Russian general, and, wanting to please the young officer, made copies of the blueprints of a cannon which the general thoughtlessly showed her. Fired by the success of this amateur effort, she offered her services to German officers and received professional training as a spy under Colonel NicolaL She was credited with organising the German spy system in Italy, and the accomplishment of dangerous missions in France and England.

Toward the end of the war she was appointed head of a section of the espionage system at Berlin. It is said that her memoirs would be worth thousands of pounds if she cared to write them.