Midsummer Dragnet

Throughout the world last week, secret agents were on the move--many of them in the direction of jail. The U.S. had just rounded up its Fourth of July catch; West Germany was trying three spies who had penetrated its supposedly impenetrable Gehlen intelligence organization (see following story); and Britain had two spy thrillers running concurrently.

Defeated Machinery. On trial in London, Italian-born Atomic Physicist Giuseppe Martelli tried to explain away his possession of hollow-heeled shoes suitable for concealing microfilm, cigarette packs containing thin, inflammable message pads, sheets of rendezvous instructions, a high-powered camera, and a superstrength radio receiver. He had accepted all these gadgets from the Russians, he said, only to string them along and then denounce them at the right time to the British authorities. Asked the judge: "You felt that you could defeat the whole machinery of Soviet intelligence?"

And, also in London, one of the oddest of the spy cases came to light when the government admitted that it was granting asylum to Anatoly Dolnytsin, a former senior Russian intelligence officer who defected to the West 18 months ago, and had spent the intervening time being thoroughly pumped by U.S. and British agents. One reported result: the revelation that British Newsman H.A.R. Philby was indeed the "third man" who enabled Spies Burgess and Maclean to escape arrest and flee to Russia in 1951. Last winter Philby, too, slipped behind the Iron Curtain just ahead of pursuing MI-5 agents. Although the government had made quite a show of asking the British press not to print the story, the authorities had in fact leaked it. Laborites charged that this possibly endangered Dolnytsin, who is somewhere in a British hideout, and that Dolnytsin was being unveiled now by Macmillan's government in the hope of claiming a spy success after so many security disasters.

Fingered Spies. So many Red spies are caught, probably because there are so many more of them around. The U.S. State Department estimates that the Communist nations employ more than 300,000 trained agents, who are helped in their prying by the "legal" spies attached to the 46 Soviet embassies and legations in the free world. (The U.S. operates with a crack corps of agents only about one-fifth as large.)

But why were so many Red spies coming to light at once?* Whenever one great power has a big espionage roundup, as Russia did last May in the trial of Russian Scientist Oleg Penkovsky, who turned out to be a longtime Western agent, spies elsewhere brace themselves for a period of rough weather. Furthermore, there is a seasonal factor involved; summer is the traditional time to put the finger on spies. Around the end of June, many Communist "diplomats" prepare to go home for vacations and new instructions. Having had an eye on them already, the FBI then often decides to pounce and expose them before they can be reassigned.

Native Passion. One fact to emerge from the recent wave of arrests is that the Soviet apparatus seems sentimentally fond of such old cloak-and-dagger standbys as false bottoms in valises, hidden compartments in talcum-powder cans and toothpaste tubes, and flashlights with message chambers instead of batteries. A Russian spy's residence usually has as many trap doors, hollow beams, false walls, secret passages and double-and triple-locked doors as a Grade B horror movie.

Actually, agents both East and West have benefited enormously from far more modern devices. It is now possible to eavesdrop on a conversation held in the middle of an empty prairie by simply pointing a beam of light from 500 yards away. New cameras can take pictures in total darkness without the use of infra-red light. Finely ground lenses can zoom in from blocks away to pick up the fine print on an insurance policy. But the Soviets like the more old-fashioned and romantic gadgets, mostly, it seems, from a native passion for melodrama.

* Recently nabbed Red agents include Sweden's ex-Military Attache Stig Wennerstrom; Russia's Ivan Egerov and wife, attached to the U.N. secretariat; two unidentified Russians caught in Washington using the names and papers of innocent living Americans, as well as a British corporal, a French naval reservist, a U.S. yeoman and half a dozen Russian, Rumanian and Czech diplomats.

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