Eggshells & Espionage

French newshawks spent a great deal of time last week trying to connect the late Alexandre Stavisky and the great "international spy ring" about which the French police were growing so eloquent following the confessions of U. S. Citizen Robert Gordon Switz & wife. The pay is too small and the risks too great for a swindler like Sacha Stavisky to bother with international espionage. But one connection between the two stories was obvious. Both the Paris police and the Surete Generale were under orders to play the Switz spy scare for all it was worth in a gallant if hopeless effort to distract an enraged public from the malodorous morass of L'Affaire Stavisky.

Faced with the evidence of fingerprints on secret films, the Switzes confessed to being agents, said that their original orders came from Roosevelt Field, L. I. French police made it sound much better than that. They succeeded in embroiling the Switzes with almost everyone accused of espionage in France for the past year, talked largely of an international gang that worked for the strange partners. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, against France, Britain and the U. S. The apartment of a Mlle. Baila Englard was raided. It was unoccupied but reported to be full of secret drawers, sliding panels and lists of people whose names were not divulged. French agents announced that the real head of the Ring was one Violette Levine, a U. S. schoolteacher. But the shy Violette could not be found. Seven more people were arrested for espionage last week, including a Col. Dumoulin, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, accused of selling documents stolen from the War College, and Camille Andre, a onetime stockbroker who attempted to peddle naval plans which neither the British nor Japanese consulates in Marseilles needed. Announced the Surete Generale: "Police throughout Europe cooperated with us, but we found the aid of the American police most valuable." All this was news to both Federal agents in New York and Inspector Joseph Donovan of the Criminal Identification Bureau who stated that he had not been asked to make any investigation of the Switzes, their family or their friends. Just to be sure, Scotland Yard carefully examined the Chelsea, London flat in which the Switzes lived for many months. There they found a new touch of mystery--dozens & dozens of eggshells, carefully blown, with a neat hole in one end of each.

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