SPIES: Good Offices

One November evening two British agents were jerked to Germany by the Gestapo, which caught them just inside the Dutch border. They were Captain Richard Henry Stevens, chief of the British passport office at The Hague and alleged head of the British Intelligence Service on the Continent, and Sigismund Payne Best, socially prominent Hague representative of various foreign firms. Nazi sources let it be understood that these two gentlemen were suspected of interest if not complicity in the Munich Bürgerbräu Keller attempt on Adolf Hitler; that, held in Berlin, Captain Stevens was “confessing” volubly to sabotage activities of the B. I. S. But for factual intents & purposes, the two simply disappeared down the drain of the Gestapo. Last week the British Government (which confided its German interests to the U. S.) asked the U. S. Embassy in Berlin to find out: 1) where Messrs. Stevens and Best are; 2) if alive, whether they are charged with a crime punishable by death.

» During 1939, Germany executed 41 persons for espionage. Last week off dropped the head of 1940’s first: Heinrich Gebhardt, 22, operative for a power undisclosed.