FOILING ENEMY SPIES.

Taihape Daily Times, 13 September 1919, Page 7

FOILING ENEMY SPIES.

—._..a——o.__?-.-l WORK OF BRITISH CENSORS. , l WONDER-FUL RESULTS ACHIEVED. i j_. l Gradually light is being thrown upon the past. hidden things? of war. And a 2 wonderful light it is. Take the Postal ~. Censor’s Depaitnient, for instance, says 5 ti Lomlcn paper. :i closed, but it will leave a great story 3 behind it.‘ in»-~.~ During its war-time ‘career is dis- " played an ingenuity which, raising to meetevery occasion, foiled the spies of the craftiest enemy. that ever ,wa-ged war. ' ~ "“ I -Letters yielded] up all their secrets,‘ even when written in the most abstruse I 3 codes or in Swahili, Georgian, Basque” ‘ Nee-Syriac, Korean, Bantu, and even; in Esperanto characters in Braille form. ’ Nor was that all. The: Postal Censor: I Mastered 1-12 languages. - ' Read 375,517 letters a day, weighing [four tons, and Provided a universal revealer of invisible inks. I ’ Obviously, the public heard very lit-1 tle ofithis work during the war. The: ‘very essence of the Department was’ secrecy, and the organisation had to be. improvised. It had to learn its duties as it went along. .Gradually the demands upen it ‘grew, until a stafi‘ of I I 4680 was employed at a large’ building] 'in Portugal Street. . _ ~ l 011 the face of it -the work might,’ have looked simple enough. You opened‘ la letter and rea-d—in Germian, -orl 1 French, or Spanish, or Russian———the in-I l formation that a. liner would lea.Ve Cardiif on the evening tide of a certain? V date. All you had to do was to hand! the letter over to the Admiralty, and a‘ German plot was foiled. But. it was by no means so simple.’ The spy does not usually give himself! away in that apparent manner. He may | write -an ordinary letter, sending his‘ love t-o Uncle John, and hoping that’ father ’S gout is better, with the real! information written in invisible ink. 01'! he may send his missive in shorthand—— and there are dozens of systems to choose from. Or he may choose some complicated cypher code, and here, again, the field of choice is practically illirnitable. i There are -other dodges. One. harm—[ less-looking letter was written on the: back of a map of the city of Amster¥l dam. There was not -much in that tel excite suspicion; paper had been shortl enough; but the lynx-eyed censor stu-' died is, and saw that all the dotted‘ tramlineg were carefully wroked out in' the Morse code. I That. hidden me.ssage’s purport put; the police on the track of a dangerous: SPY- « 1 Perhaps the most. wonderful work! of all has been done by Miss A:dency, and Mr Lloyd in a top room. "They; have spent their ‘time in tearing the! heart out of the secrets of the number-l less cypher codes employed. C-onipai-ed; with ithse two the deetetive in fiction: is a more infant. An -apparentlyi meaningless jumble of letters or figures l or alpl:-abets made for the occasion liavel concealed nothing from them. , ‘ In the next room has been Mr Collins , * and his assistants dealing with letters: l written in. invisible ink_ He will show’ 1 you how a letter written with milk can‘ i be made visible by merely rubbing a : little graphite over it; or one on which) 1 lemon juice has been used, with a : warm flat-iron. A letter written with. a! pen in human saliva can be read ‘lulte : easily if a brush dipped in blue ink“ is passed over it. ' ~ Letters treated. ‘by the thousand had to be so treated every day. Conse- : quently llr Collins set about discovering a universal. revealer——and he suc- l ceeded. l °- I