Secret Armies | Page 5

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 Cadogan, who replaced Sir Robert Vansittart as adviser to the British Cabinet and who acts in a supervisory capacity over the extraordinarily powerful British Intelligence Service.
Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the London Times.
Lord Lothian, Governor of the National Bank of Scotland, a determined advocate of refusing arms to the Spanish democratic government while Hitler and Mussolini supplied Franco with them.
Tom Jones, adviser to former Premier Baldwin.
The Right Honorable E.A. Fitzroy, Speaker of the House of Commons.
The Baroness Mary Ravensdale, sister-in-law of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascist movement.
To understand the amazing game played by the Cliveden house guests, in which nations and peoples have already been shuffled about as pawns, one must remember that