Evening star., 1939-11-05

be able to decipher what it is saying. Privacy
has become perfected accomplishment.
The high hopes that were held for the trans
oceanic telephone as an instrument of peace
have not been fulfilled - for the present. The
cable still holds its old supremacy for several
reasons. Yet, if the fullest use were made of
its already available possibilities for secrecy,
the telephone might easily outstrip the cable.
And tomorrow, with television added, it may
really take the place that was predicted for it
more than a decade ago.
Today. however, the telephone is not as
secret as it could be- The voice crossing the
ocean can be perfectly garbled, and with such
thoroughness and skill that no eavesdropper,
even with the best ungarbing instruments,
stands more than an inhnitesimal chance of
Strengthening out the speech and making it
ineligible. But the secrecy is only in the
ether between radio-control rooms, and not at
the switchboards and beyond. If the British
government does not have someone to listen
to state telephone talks, all duly unscrambled,
then it is missing bet. Certainly any talk by
telephone from England to Berlin, Rome,
Moscow or Tokyo is carefully listened to and
recorded. The amateur with the shOrt-Wave
set may not be able to eavesdrop, but the
secret services of foreign governments are.
And. of course, they do.
That does not preclude the use of the tele-
phone for important state communication. A
man in Washington and one in Europe or Asia
who know each other intimately can say things
over the telephone and. by using innuendo and
jargon, convey meanings that would evade
any secret service listener. But the practice
is beset by too many dangers for comfort.
President Roosevelt and Ambassador Bulltt
are old cronies and can hear between the
words as the peruser of letter can read
between the lines But that possibility has not
permitted the transoceanic telephone to revo-
lutionize diplomacy. It's still one of the
humber servants.
One can imagine that no one would testify
more econvncingly that this is true than Henry
L. Stimson. Hoover's secretary of state. The
four transatlantic telephone conversations he
W I'LL JOlul SLIiOH, IiiCii DilSAoil lSIClSH
secretary, about the Manchurian crisis in 1882
are now the accepted classic demonstration of
the limitations of the telephone for inter-
governmental conversations.
Sir John, to begin with, is middle-aged
Englishman and middle-aged Englishmen are
not what might be called telephone broken.
They don t like to telephone in the first place;
they dislike still more to talk personal busi-
ness by telephone; and they are positively
shocked by the mere thought of talking affairs
of state by telephone. The average upper
middle-class Englishman would rather write
letter by hand than transmit it by phone.
Mr. Stimson himselfhas told how he decided
to call up Sir John at time when action under
the Nine Power Treaty to restrain Japan in
Manchuria was impossible to obtain. What he
proposed to Sir John was joint Anglo-Amer-
ican action. The record of the talks has not
been published, but some day it will be, for
State Department stenographer took them
down. Not until they are published will the
world know how concrete Mr.. Stimson's
proposal was. One can only guess that
American opinion being what it was, and Mr..
Stimson being an exceedingly cautious dip
(Continved on poss 13
s.