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GERMAN SPY SYSTEM IN THIS COUNTRY The elaborateness o this country its extraordinary organization proved its undoing in the hour of crisis crisisIn In a single offkc of a railway company or other large American business establishment employing 100 to 300 men there might have been three or four German spies working in the same room for years and not one of them even suspecting that any of the others was a fellow spy In the United States at least a German spy never knows who is just above him in rank or who is just below him As a matter of fact each one is ordered to report to just one man in the United States and to receive instructions only from that man To understand the wrecking of the system on April 0 1917 take the entirely supposable case of a German spy lo ¬ cated in Omaha who had not been discovered by the Department of Justice and consequently was not seized during the roundup on April G He would have kiiown just one other German spy in the United States this being a man in Chicago per ¬ haps to whom he reported and from whom he re ¬ ceived orders But while the Omaha man escaped arrest his superior in Chicago was seized Of course the Omaha spy had 110 means of knowing that the Chicago man had been seized all he knew was that after April 6 he did not hear from the Chicago spy and could not get iuto communication with him The Chicago man had simply dis ¬ appeared without leaving a trace of his where ¬ abouts Here then was the Omaha spy completely isolated still at liberty but marooned in a foreign laud not knowing or even suspecting the identity of a single other spy planted here by the German government He had nobody to turn to nobody whom he could trust nobody from whom he could receive instructions The German spy machine had been organized with such elaborate secrecy that when a single link was broken the chain fell to pieces Century
