Secret Armies | Page 5

stamps are on

the cover facing the passport title page, it is a sign to Gestapo
representatives and Consulates that the bearer is an agent who crossed
the border hurriedly without time to get the regular numbers and letters
from Gestapo headquarters. The agent is given this means of temporary
identification by the border Gestapo chief.
Also, whenever immigration authorities find a German passport issued
to the bearer for less than five years and then extended to the regulation
five-year period, they may be certain that the bearer is a new Gestapo
agent who is being tested by controlled movements in a foreign country.
For his first Gestapo mission in Holland, for instance, Voigt was given
a passport August 15, 1936, good for only fourteen days. His chief was
not sure whether or not Voigt had agreed to become an agent just to get
a passport and money to escape the country; so his passport period was
limited.
When the fourteen-day period expired, Voigt would have to report to
the Nazi Consulate for a renewal. In this particular instance, the
passport was marked "Non-renewable Except by Special Permission of
the Chief of Dresden Police." When Voigt performed his Holland
mission successfully, he was given the usual five-year passport.
Any German whose passport shows a given limited time, which has
been subsequently extended, gives proof that he has been tested and
found satisfactory by the Gestapo.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Frau Suchy was one of the most active members of Konrad
Henlein's Deutscher Volksbund, a propaganda and espionage
organization masquerading as a "cultural" body in the Sudeten area.
She is today a leading official in the new German Sudetenland.
[3] The Rev. Smith returned to England when he learned that the
Czechoslovakian secret police were watching him. At the present
writing he had not returned to his church in Prague.

II
England's Cliveden Set
The work of foreign agents does not necessarily involve the securing of
military and naval secrets. Information of all kinds is important to an
aggressor planning an invasion or estimating a potential enemy's
strength and morale; and often a diplomatic secret is worth far more
than the choicest blueprint of a carefully guarded military device.
There are persons whom money, social position, political promises or
glory cannot interest in following a policy of benefit to a foreign power.
In such instances, however, protection of class interests sometimes
drives them to acts which can scarcely be distinguished from those of
paid foreign agents. This is especially true of those whose financial
interests are on an international scale and who consequently think
internationally.
Such class interests were involved in the betrayal of Austria to the
Nazis only a few months before aggressor nations were invited to cut
themselves a slice of Czechoslovakia; and it will probably never be
known just how much the Nazis' Fifth Column, working in dinner
jackets and evening gowns, influenced the powerful personages
involved to chart a course which sacrificed a nation and a people and
which foretold the Munich "peace" pact.
The story begins when Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of
England, accepted an invitation to spend the week-end of March 26-27,
1938, at Cliveden, Lord and Lady Astor's country estate at Taplow,
Buckinghamshire, in the beautiful Thames Valley. When the Prime
Minister and his wife arrived at the huge Georgian house rising out of a
fairyland of gardens and forests with the placid river for a background,
the other guests who had already arrived and their hosts were under the
horseshoe stone staircase to receive them.
The small but carefully selected group of guests had been invited "to
play charades" over the week-end--a game in which the participants
form opposing sides and act a certain part while the opponents try to

guess what they are portraying. Every man invited held a strategic
position in the British government, and it was during this "charades
party" week-end that they secretly charted a course of British policy
which will affect not only the fate of the British Empire but the course
of world events and the lives of countless millions of people for years
to come.
This course, which indirectly menaces the peace and security of the
United States, deliberately launched England on a series of maneuvers
which made Hitler stronger and will inevitably lead Great Britain on
the road to fascism. The British Parliament and the British people do
not know of these decisions, some of which the Chamberlain
government has already carried out.
And without a knowledge of what happened during the talks in those
historic two days and what preceded them, the world can only puzzle
over an almost incomprehensible British foreign policy.
Present at this week-end gathering, besides the Astors and the Prime
Minister and his wife, were the following:
Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Defense.
Sir Alexander