Free Burn After Reading by Ladislas Farago Page A

Although she said all of her relatives lived on the British Isles, she was receiving letters from the United States, France, Holland and even South Africa; and she was forever posting letters to all sorts of faraway places.
    Mrs. Jordan’s mail was quietly opened, and what Colonel Cooke read in those letters convinced him that the trim widow was the central maildrop of a broad German espionage net. She was arrested, tried and given a four-year sentence.
    As is usual in such cases, suspect cards were prepared of people supposed to be in the ring; their identity was revealed by the surveillance of Mrs. Jordan, though they were not arrested. These persons were then shadowed and led the counter-espionage agents to still other suspects. In due course, the Jordan case yielded scores of suspects and Colonel Cooke was breathing a bit easier.
    Fortunately for Cooke, Busch’s formidable rings were showing their hands in still other ways. In Portslade, in Sussex Downs,lived a retired officer of the British army, Ervine Batley, who had an unusual hobby. An enthusiast of Sussex Downs, he became an expert of the region and spent years preparing a series of unique contour maps which became famous.
    One day in 1938, a young man knocked at his door, and introducing himself candidly as a German tourist on a hiking tour, asked Captain Batley for some of his famous maps. The captain tipped off the constable at Portslade and MI.5 was called. Nothing was done to interfere with the young tourist’s hike, but he was shadowed from then on. He led Colonel Cooke’s men to a cluster of German agents.
    At about the same time, a British subject named Joseph Kelly was caught red-handed spying for the Germans. He was a bricklayer and helped in the construction of several new defense installations. He had access to blueprints and sold some of them to the Nazis. Before he was arrested, he also led MI.5 to several of his associates. Among them was Walther Reinhardt, a German intelligence director serving as consul in Liverpool. Reinhardt was expelled in due course, but before he left he also helped to enlarge the file of cards in the office of Colonel Cooke.
    Far more important than these and similar haphazard leads was a source MI.5 developed laboriously as an inside job. From the fallen spies, Colonel Cooke found out that German agents were trained in the Abwehr school in Hamburg. MI.5 decided to smuggle a plant into the school. The man they picked for the job was a young British linguist.
    He managed to get a job in the Abwehr school, teaching colloquial English to German spies about to go to England. From then on, of course, MI.5 was able to accord every new German agent arriving in England the reception due such special tourists. They were not arrested, but all were placed under surveillance. A known spy-at-large can be watched and can be fed misleading information, whereas, if he is arrested, he is likely to be replaced and it may take some time before his replacement can be identified. In this particular case, a wholesaledetention of the youthful linguist’s pupils would have made the Abwehr suspicious of the tutor himself.
    This daring young man had several means of alerting MI.5 to incoming Germans. His favorite method of warning developed out of his native sense of humor. Agents going on a resident mission had to take a course from him in English habits and customs. He told them that those staid Britons were suckers for respectability, and, being a nation of shopkeepers, measured respectability in terms of pounds, shillings and pence.
    He suggested, therefore, that when they arrived in Britain, they take their money to the nearest post office and open a postal savings account. But, he cautioned, it was not enough to do just that. One’s respectability had to be demonstrated, and the people who were the most important to convince were the police. Therefore, he suggested that they lose their passbooks and report the loss to the