SWISS TRAP GERMAN SPY.

Taihape Daily Times, 5 February 1918, Page 5

SWISS TRAP GERMAN SPY.

SOMMERS AND HIS AGENTS.

GENEVA

Switzerland's most notorious spy has been sentenced to five months' imprisonment and a fine for his activity on behalf of Germany. He is Baron Heinrich von Sommers, alias Dr. Henry F. Somerset, His expulsion from Switzerland for two years has been odered.

His case not only is interesting because of the audacity of his work but because for almost three years ho posed as an American, managed to induce two' United States Embassies to give him 'American x^ssp ol and almost got another from a third embassy. He has been a" German since a clever clerk

discovered the fraud he was perpetrating, and, in the former American Embassy, in Berlin, took away from him the passport he had wheedled out of the American Embassy in Rome. Since shortly after that time Somerset, or von Sommers, or Van Siemers, as he sometimes was called, has been in Switzerland, whither he came armed with Gcrmon papers, and after unsuccessfully offering his services as a spy to both the French and the English, has, at his trial revealed been working for the German Government.

Sommers' business had been to collect and train Swiss agents to send to France, where they were to gather as much military and political inform-, ation as possible,, while Sommers remained in Geneva and kept track of returning repatriates and obtained all the information possible. Information obtained in either way would be carried to Zurich by one of the trio and sent over into Germany by underground means. Sommers, however, made another mistake. He picked the wrong man in his search for agents. That man, a news dealer, pretended to agree to his plan, even accepted money from him and then told the police. Thus the Swiss got him and have made him harmless for a while.