The Mail-Order Spooks

The request sounded legitimate enough to the Public Information Officer of the U.S. Army's 24th Division, stationed in West Germany. And so for months a copy of Taro Leaf, the unit's weekly newspaper, had been neatly stamped, sealed and mailed off to the "Combined Allied Forces Information Center," c/o Post Office Box 14940 in Hong Kong. Since the newspaper was freely handed out in Army commissaries, and even Munich and Augsburg hotel lobbies, nobody at the 24th Division gave the matter a second thought. Neither did anyone at VII Corps headquarters, which happily accepted a similar subscription request for its newspaper, Jayhawk, from the official-sounding CAFIC.

Then an alert officer read about it in Stars and Stripes, which reported with innocent pride that Jayhawk "can claim some of the most distant readers among unit publications. It's a long way to Hong Kong, but Combined Allied Forces Headquarters there has renewed its subscription for 1964." A quick check revealed that there was no such thing as CAFIC. Indeed, it turned out that Hong Kong's P.O. Box 14940 was simply a mail drop for Communist Chinese spies. Though the newspapers contained no military secrets, Peking's intelligence agents apparently read them avidly for hints of U.S. army morale, announcements of troop movements, maneuvers and other tidbits that might fit into a larger mosaic of U.S. military effectiveness.

Last week red-faced officials announced that some revisions had been made on their mailing lists, and that tighter controls would be observed in the future. Peking had lost its subscriptions, and Taro Leaf and Jayhawk had lost some of their most avid readers.

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