The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-07-07

country, today authorized publication spies and censorship made to the Ma
 the work of spies in England and the the cables through neutral countries of any except technical military and T | Only on two occasions in the last month. Lord Northcliffe said, had he seen anything published in American newspapers that might have been of value to the enemy. The address fol- lows:
 What does not yet seem to be un- , derstood here. and what we did not 1 understand at the beginning of the | war, is that the really deadly high explosive news is not newspaper news | but the news sent out by spies in code 1 to neutral countries for transmission ] to Germany
 TASK NOT TOO GREAT Admitted that the task of examin- | ing hundreds of thousands of cables a | day is difficult and costly, admitted 1 that keen brains are here in abund- 1 ance. and the outgoing cables can easily be co-ordinated so that all ca bles addressed to the same names abroad and even to the same town abroad come under the eyes of the same censors. week after week, it is by means of checking back cables ad-
 dressed from England to neutral coun- tries that we have caught many of our l spies.
 Tt is not difficult for spies to get i news. Their task is the delivery of the goods and on that task they con- centrate.
 MEANS OF COMMUNICATION Now that ocean travel has become so difficult, now that the British mail censor has perfected his methods, the enemy spy working in your midst IS thrown back entirely on the cable and one or two steamer routes.
 T do not know whether you have a mail censorship on letters to Spain, but I venture to think that if you have not and start opening letters to haul of information as our secret serv ice department did out of the censor ing of American letters to Europe. MUST BE REMORSELESS "The cable censor must be remorse- less if he finds constant domestic tele- grams going to one particular place. At the risk of disturbing happy homes he must hold up or destroy the cables. A world of meaning can be concealed behind the words. mother better,' or mother going to seashore.' Many com plaints will come from business men as to detention of their messages, but business men of standing can easily satisfy the cable authorities and in any case the main business at the present time is war and lives are more inn portant than business losses. We in England were loath to be- lieve in the existence of an extensive German spy system in our midst un- til strange happenings by land and sea proved that their spy preparations, firmly established in England years before the war, were just as effi- cient as all their other preparations. SPIES OF MANY CLASSES
 "The German spies are divided into five or six classes, working inde- pendently of each other
 There is the business spy, whose
 work is the gathering of information. personal and otherwise. An establish ment called Schimmel Pfennigs opened up in England, purporting to be something like your Bradstretts or Duns, but really with the object of ascertaining the capacity for making
 guns, munitions and what not of ev- cry plant in England, together with any other information that might be useful to Germany when she went to war.
 "A second form of spying was or ganized by the German consuls in Great Britain. who collected informa- . tion by means of hotel walters, bar bers, governesses and domestic ser vants to whom they paid compara- lively small sums monthly.
 Tn naval and military towns the
 German government provided Germans with capital with which to open and
 purchase hotels. All this was done through the consuls.
 SOCIETY SPIES
 Then there was series of spies organized by the famous department which had it's headauarters in Brus" sells. These were spies who moved about in good social circles as rule, picking up any information they could get. When it came to picking up in formation as to British psychology they got it all wrong, for it has been notorious that, almost without excep- tion, they reported to Berlin that Great Britain would not go to war. Members of this class of spy were entirely unknown to each other and only known to headquarters by num- bers. They were paid minimum or 5000 and maximum of $12,000 a year. and were usually engaged ir. some other kind of work--very often insurance work. very often as travel ing salesmen. Quite number of them were women. Out of respect for their sex among the spies we have shot at the Tower of London the women have been exempted and sent to long terms of Imprisonment.
 MILITARY AND NAVAL Further. there were the military and the naval spies This kind of spy- ing is regarded as legitimate among all nations. Carl Lody. whom I saw tried by court-martial and who had an American passport and spoke 1 American with the slightest German accent, was legitimate naval spy and was so regarded by our authorities. who treated him as we'll as he could be treated in the circumstances and finally very properly shot him. He was captured owing to clumsiness on his part. Among other foolishnesses he kept his code in his pocket and there fore knew at the moment he was ar rested that he was dead man. One of the things that led to his detection was the cable censorship.
 WARNED FOR YEARS
 we had been warned for years that
 the country was full of German spies, but
 did not believe it. Germans were ad-
 mitted to our clubs. went about among
 us and seemed very friendly. At the out
 break of war we found that We had been