GERMAN SPY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 October 1938, Page 5

GERMAN SPY

IDENTITY DISCLOSED DURING DELIRIUM. "MISSIONS” IN ENGLAND. A dangerous spy, in the pay of the Germans, who avoided detection for 25 years, betrayed himself on his sick bed in moments of fever. His utterances were overheard by his landlady, and the man, Carl Daelen, alias Wormstal, a Dutch sea captain, was sentenced to 20 imprisonment by a military court at Lille, in Northern France. It has been established from papers found on him and supported by his admissions, that he was an active agent of the Germans all through the war and that he took nine “missions” to England during those years to obtain information. Daelen arrived at Lille early this year with a passport bearing the name of Wormstal. It is now known that his mission was to obtain for Germany particulars of the section of the Maginot line passing through the region in order to complete their knowledge of the whole line. He became ill and in his moments of fever talked freely in Dutch, which his Flemish landlady understood. She reported the matter to the police, who installed a dictaphone in the sick room. When enough records had been made of the fevered man’s utterances, which had also been overheard by a police offcer in an adjoining room, he was questioned. Faced with the damning evidence of the dictaphone records, he admitted his 25 years’ work as a German agent. Daelen’s recent "missions” in England seem to have been concerned chiefly with Air Defence secrets and counter-measures against submarine attacks.