Whizz--the Police!

Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh was observed to treat a certain Correspondent Carlisle MacDonald with less coldness than anyone else who covered him in Paris. Therefore Manhattan's Times sent suave Scot MacDonald from France to the U. S. on the same warboat that carried the Colonel home. Last week Mr. MacDonald, long since back in Paris, was strolling down the Rue de la Paix when the biggest French story of the week broke before his eyes.

Whizz! Half a dozen French bicycle police scooted up, with mustaches bristling, and surrounded a small, inoffensive U. S. roadster. With screeching breaks a large limousine drew up also, and out hopped several excited agents of the Surete General (Secret Service). Cried a Surete plain clothes man to the occupant of the roadster: "Are you M. Harold Horan, representative of M. Guillaume Randolph Hearst?"

Said the man in the roadster, "Old, je suis Horan."

The police, reassured that they had found their man, spirited Hearst Correspondent Horan off to jail and grilled him for seven hours. They refused him a lawyer, refused to let him telephone, and only grudgingly allowed him to send out for a sandwich and what Mr. Horan later described as "a bottle of water." Over and over and over the Agents asked him how and from whom he obtained the secret details of the new Anglo-French naval agreement (TIME, Aug. 13 et seq.), first scooped and published throughout the U. S. by Hearst newspapers.

Stubbornly Correspondent Horan refused to tell. A Hearst man to the core, he once tutored the Hearst children, was rewarded by elevation to Correspondenthood. Finally the examining Agents became so vexed that they offered Prisoner Horan his choice between being made to stand trial for stealing important documents (penalty if convicted five years at hard labor) or, alternatively, he could go free by signing a paper stated to contain admissions made by him while on the grill.

Mr. Horan chose to sign.

Meanwhile, although hundreds of persons had witnessed the arrest, the only one who recognized Mr. Horan and had the common sense to inform Mr. Koran's office was Lindbergher Carlisle MacDonald.

Cables flashed. Mr. William Randolph Hearst called personally on President Calvin Coolidge. The President was understood to have opined that Mr. Koran's case came solely within the jurisdiction of the French courts. To reporters gathered on the White House lawn Publisher Hearst said: "The French authorities are behaving like spoiled children. . . . Why should they make this ridiculous fuss about the publication of their secret agreement with Great Britain, unless there is something in it that they are ashamed of?"

Meanwhile Hearstling Horan, released by the police, hurriedly sped to Brussels, Belgium, then London, lest he be again molested. To news colleagues he explained that Mr. Hearst himself gave him the secret document for transmission to the U. S. in the Hearst suite at the Hotel Crillon, Paris, on Sept. 18 last. French cable companies refused to transmit the despatch, so Correspondent Horan mailed it to London, whence it was put on the wire to Manhattan.

Relying on this straightforward statement, the Association of American and British Correspondents in Paris adopted an indignant resolution sympathizing with Mr. Horan. Then the French Surete General privily informed the Association what was written on the paper signed in jail by Correspondent Horan, and at once the Association expelled him from its membership, offering only a vague explanation: ''unprofessional conduct."

Throughout the week London, Paris and Berlin papers speculated at length on "who stole the document?"; and the grave international aspects of the affair were set forth in many a paper, including Berlin's Democratic Morgenpost:

"The British and French Governments concluded their naval agreement according to the oldest formulas of secret diplomacy. Neither parliament nor public was informed, and probably not even all the members of the governments.

"The consequences of the publication, which later was supplemented by other material, were naturally anything but pleasant to the French and English Governments. The English Government got a note from America and preferred to be glad that the note was polite and not peppery.

"Whether the official of the French Foreign Office who gave the document to Horan received money from him or not, we don't know. More likely, however, he realized the danger of the agreement to France and wanted to nullify it."

The authoritative Paris Journal des Debats, which almost invariably reflects the attitude of the French Government, said: "Horan and Hearst, if they again come to Paris, ought to be arrested, condemned and put in prison. . . . M. Hearst placed at the disposition of his collaborator a sum which in the country of dollars perhaps seems small, but which in the land of paper francs means something. One talks of $5,000 or $10,000. Hearst and Horan committed a low and fraudulent action against international public order. We like to believe that they will be judged as they deserve by their own compatriots."

The French Foreign Office finally intimated that the source of the leak was one M. Jean Marie Etienne de Noblet.