International Spies

When Hollywood was turning out films about international spies, it was conventional for minor characters in each picture to exhibit abnormal stupidity, thus accenting the shrewdness of the heroes. Last week, a real international spy story spread across U. S. front pages which vividly accented the shrewdness of nobody at all.

Last February, Department of Justice agents arrested a brush-haired American youth of Austrian parentage, Guenther Gustave Rumrich, formerly a sergeant in the U. S. Army, and a plump German fraeulein, Johanna Hofmann. Rumrich's blundering offense was describing himself as "Mr. Weston, Under Secretary of State," a nonexistent character, while applying to the U. S. Passport Bureau in Manhattan for 50 blank passports. Fraeulein Hofmann, a hairdresser on the German liner Europa, was allegedly his accomplice, in a capacity, for which nature had not fitted her, of lure. On the strength of its coup, the Department of Justice asked for a grand jury investigation. Leading witness was to be a Manhattan doctor, Ignatz T. Griebl.

Dr. Griebl had a copy of a secret code, used by Miss Hofmann. He was the addressee of a letter found among her personal effects. He was a onetime president of the now defunct Friends of New Germany. Government agents counted on him as a star witness. They were shocked last week, when the investigation started: Ignatz Griebl had boarded the Bremen and was on the high seas, bound for Germany. At first glance, it appeared that this escape of Ignatz from a hair net was a brilliant piece of work. The assumption proved unwarranted. In his haste to leave, Dr. Griebl, naturalized in 1926, had forgotten to take along his U. S. passport. At Cherbourg French authorities were denied permission to search the ship for him. When the Bremen docked in Germany, he was promptly arrested, fined 60 marks ($25) permitted to remain. Reporters jumped to the conclusion that Griebl, ready to turn state's evidence, had been kidnapped by loyal spies on the Bremen, or, having fooled Department of Justice agents, he had been arrested by his own Government as a blind.

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Mrs. Jessie Wallace Jordan, a 51-year-old British-born hairdresser who became a German citizen by marriage, was tried for espionage. Main evidence against Mrs. Jordan was her sketches of certain unidentified County of Fife fortifications (presumably a huge aviation training airdrome at Leuchars, near Dundee, or a submarine base at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth). With 42 Crown witnesses ready to testify against her, Hairdresser Jordan changed her plea to guilty, was sentenced to four years' hard labor. Startling was the connection between this sober bit of Scottish espionage and the slapstick comedy in Manhattan: a lengthy non-tonsorial correspondence was unearthed between Hairdresser Jordan and Hairdresser Hofmann.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.