Again, Spies

A Czechoslovak spy was arrested in Hungary last week. The incident emptied summer hotels, stopped trains, brought talk of war.

The ascertainable facts might have seemed thin in any place but Central Europe. But that part of the world is as full of spies as of flies. Only last fortnight Prague's Narodni Politika, commenting absently on the spy situation, observed with interest that Russian spies seemed to be unusually numerous this year.

Last week's episode was this:

One Vincent Pecha, Czech railway ticket-agent, was making a comfortable meal of fried veal and beer in the station restaurant at Hidas Nemeti, Hungarian frontier town.

Entered some Hungarian gendarmes with drawn pistols, forced Vincent Pecha to throw up his hands, searched him, clapped gyves upon his wrists. In the room next to the station restaurant "a secret military document" was found. Using suitable pressure, the Hungarians got Pecha to admit having hidden it.

Spy or ticket-taker, Vincent Pecha was well thought of in his own country. To protest his arrest, Czechoslovak officials halted the Budapest-Kassa train service. Not to be outdone, Hungarian vacationists left Czechoslovak resorts, cancelled reservations at Tatra and Karlsbad, prepared to drink their August sulphur water in Germany instead. Prague newspapers cried for further reprisals to obtain the release of Pecha, talked headily of war. Hungarian authorities, convinced of Pecha's guilt, did nothing but hold their prisoner, prepared to try him.

Prague's interest in the Pecha incident was modified during the week by the trial and sentence, in Prague, of another Czech spy--a Czech working against his own country. Capt. Jaroslaf Falout, Czechoslovak general staff officer, carelessly left a suitcase in the cabin of a Prague-Berlin airplane. The contents of the suitcase were so interesting that he was immediately arrested, charged with being a German agent, charged also with the more lucrative, more prosaic crime of forging officers' leave permits.

The Czech military court sentenced Falout to 19 years' imprisonment with the following embroideries:

1) The first and sixth month of every year to be in solitary confinement.

2) One day each month, to live on bread and water.*

3) Each Sept. 28 to be spent in a dark cell.

*Anniversary of the death of Saint Venclaus (Bohemia's "good King Wenceslas"), to be nationally celebrated this year as his millennium.