The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1921-03-10
CERMANY'S SPY SYSTEM UNLIKE
 FAIRY STORIES
Workers Greed For Gold Is Greater Than Their
 Patriotism.

Berhn-German spies. making up that vague. mysterious army credited with spreading bombs. flue, poison and propaganda in Allied lands. kept the home sector on the alert until the armistice. Even now the newspapers occasionally report German spies or their ghosts stalking through the land perpetratfng fearful deeds. A high German officer, for many years an inffue uential leader in the Great General Staff, in an exclusive interview with the International News Service, pulls aside the curtain re- vealing Germany's peace time army of military spies in France. Shadows cast by distant light silhouette as giants the tiniest of men. AS the light falls on the giant shadow of the Ger man spy eclipSing all of northern France the shadow fades, and one finds scattered here and there wee pigmies of men, revealing in their soul nakedness human vice and frailty.
 The spy story was popular plot l for magazine fiction during the war. The German spy. according to the au- | thor, was usually soulless, a devil in carnate, but leading a dashing life of picturesque adventure. A glance be- hind the scenes shows more frequent ly a weak and shivering soul, living in ugly sordidnesS, experiencing none of ] the devil-may-care thrills of the mag azine villain.
 
 of the officer must be withheld, for the German military cast still has it's methods, such as ostracism, to punish officers who incur it's displeasure) was in the military intelligence section of the General Staff when the war broke out.
 How many thousands of agents did Germany have in France in peace time?" the correspondent asked him. 'HThousands?" Her von-von gave a sharp look as though he were afraid of falling into the trap of another American joke. Thousands? How on earth could you expect us to use a thousand agents in France? How could you keep them employed ?'
 "One of America's most popular weekly magazines published an ar ticle three years ago which showed how Germany had planted 30,000 in northern France before 1914. and told how these agents were organized to cooperate with the German army when war should occur.
 ''Why, even the Russian Car couldn't have supported an espionage system of those dimensions. We had sufficient difficulty getting enough money from the Reichstag to keep up the work at all"
 .1The article stated that the Ger man agents were badly .paid,' the cor respondent replied
 ''The truth is we had about one hundred military agents in France
 
 the officer. "Our maxim was quality, not quantity. The popular theory of using walters, dancers. porters and the like is the creation of the brains of novelists. We needed trained mil itary minds.
 ''Even an ordinary lieutenant or captain in the foreign army was of no value. It. was our practise, and. as we proved by exposures, the prac- tise of the French. to seek only the highest officers as agents A chief of staff or a general who could give us mobilization plans was of some value But a captain in the other army who could only report that regiment so- and-so did close order drill for three hours this moriing' was worthless.
 '"The continental espionage system used by both the French and Rus sians is typified by the case of an Austrian colonel in Prague. This col onel was chief of staff of the Austrian army division which had headquarters in Prague He was one of about Hhree or four officers who knew the Aacret mobilization plans of his corps, Which included some of the German divisions in southern Saxony. These secret orders stated exactly where each unit of troops as to go in case of war against Russia Obviously the Russians were very anxious to secure this information.
 The colonel had some very un- fortunate personal habits, a total lack If morals, rather abnormal, of such al nature as to ruin him among his af1ser comrades were the facts to be-