ARMY & NAVY: Espionage

ARMY & NAVY

When someone describing himself as “Mr. Weston, Under Secretary of State telephoned the U. S. Passport Bureau in Manhattan last fortnight and asked that 50 blank passports be sent to him at a midtown hotel, agents of the Department of Justice followed the shipment. Well they might, for the Under Secretary of State is Mr. Sumner Welles. The trail led from the hotel to a bar, to a brush-headed young man named Guenther Gustave Rumrich. Mr. Rumrich—born in Chicago to Austrian parents 27 years ago and a deserter from the U. S. Army—was reported to have wanted the passport blanks for the use of an international “spy ring.” By week’s end the agents arrested two of Mr. Rumrich’s alleged confederates, Erich Glaser, a 28-year-old German-born private in the 18th Reconnaissance Squadron stationed at Mitchel Field, New York City’s air defense centre, and Johanna Hofmann, a 26-year-old German hairdresser on the liner Europa. According to officials, all admitted that they were working for a “foreign power” but officials ostentatiously forebore to mention Germany by name.

Nothing of importance was found on Spy Rumrich but crude drawings of a plane and a tank. Spy Hofmann who spoke no English and whose orange-colored hair showed traces of dye, was arrested on the Europa with several letters she had been engaged to deliver, including one offering $1,000 for information about the Navy aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. Rumrich and Glaser had both been stationed during their Army service in the Canal Zone. Only document of importance which it was suggested they might have stolen was a copy of the secret codes of the Air Service, and Army authorities doubted that.

An indication of the value which his foreign employer put on Mr. Rumrich was his salary: $50 a month. But he had cherished at least one melodramatic and incredible plan, which his superiors prudently quashed before he had a chance to try it. It was to lure Colonel Henry W. T. Eglin from his post with the 62nd Coast Artillery at Fort Totten, N. Y. to a Manhattan hotel, where he would have been induced, either by plump Fraulein Hofmann or by violence, to surrender certain “secret mobilization plans.”

Net result was a story of espionage which made Army officials wonder whether the spies or Mr. Cummings’ agents who arrested them had been the bigger bunglers.