HUNT FOR SPIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 January 1943, Page 4

HUNT FOR SPIES

ROUND=UP IN UNITED STATES SPECTACULAR SUCCESSES. ELABORATE DETECTION SYSTEM. As three middle-aged Chicago men were escorted recently from dock to death cell, Federal Bureau of Investigation Chief Edgar G. Hoover wrote finish to another round in his fight against Axis spies. The three men, Max Hans Haupt, Walter Otto Froehling and Otto Richard Wegin, German-born but naturalised Americans had been convicted of treason in aiding the saboteur Herbert Haupt. Hoover’s Gmen, originally formed to break up the gangsters, were fast getting on top of the best spies and saboteurs produced by Berlin’s ’and Hamburg’s secret agent schools. Thousands of Germans and Italians are already under arrest or close surveillance. Months before Pearl Harbour, Hoover was prepared for the war —had already sent special agents to inspect 2300 defence factories, instructing the management in anti-sabotage precautions. Even in those days his agents discovered shafts almost sawn through, electrical lines short-circuited. They placed barbed wire around plants, posted armed guards. The most spectacular recent success was the F. 8.1. of the notorious Du Quesne gang. In a Manhattan dugout, G-men recorded the conversation of spies, even put a movie camera through a wall in such a way that it recorded all visitors against a background of a clock and a calendar. Even the most sceptical judge found it hard to doubt the evidence of times and dates so recorded. Hoover has expanded the F. 8.1. from 851 special agents in 1939 to 4300 today, has sent specialists to London and elsewhere in Europe, until he believes they have mastered all Nazi tricks. His staff sifts an average of 200,000 tips a month from the public, classifies and checks 100,000 fingerprints a month supplied by the Army, Navy and war industry. Budding G-men, at the end of an anti-sabotage course, must pass tests in determining the cause of plane wrecks, whether fuel lines have been blocked, wires cut, or vital parts removed.

F. 8.1. specialists include qualified chefs and saxophone players, ready to be planted in hotels or cabarets to check espionage activities. F. 8.1. laboratories, particularly those dealing in typewriter work, have been enlarged. A section of one Nazi spy ring was smashed by information gained from reading a typewriter ribbon.

When 47-year-old Edgar Hoover strikes, it is generally in a big way, without preliminary arrests revealing his hand.

Agents sent into many cities will work for weeks. Then one night Hoover will pick up his telephone, talk simultaneously to F. 8.1. heads in 53 different cities, discuss latest developments, order the trap to be sprung. Hoover works normally from 8.30 a.m. till 7 p.m., but will go 48 hours without sleep when a big coup is breaking.

(Herbert Haupt, 22, went from Chicago to Germany in 1941, trained as a Nazi saboteur, and returned with other Germans in a submarine to America last July. They were quickly rounded up. Haupt, with others, was executed. Max Haupt is his father),