Again Agadir?

Once again last week the indefatigable Paris-Soir produced a first-rate scandal which, like last winter's government-inspired international spy scare (TIME, March 26, April 2), distracted Frenchmen from the malodorous Stavisky scandal. The Soir's story:

On March 12 the Optimist, a tiny German freighter of only 318 tons, warped into a quay at Rotterdam from Hamburg. Dutch stevedores hustling aboard some additional cargo got a good look at the cargo already aboard : cases of rifles, cart ridges, hand grenades, several rolls of barbed wire and a camp forge. After two weeks in port, the Optimist was joined by a party of ten German Nazis and a small dark man with a little chin beard whom they called alternately Schaefer and "der kleine Schwartze." On March 27 the Optimist cleared for the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa.

French spies in Holland quickly filled in additional details. Three days before the Optimist sailed, another German freighter of almost the same size, the Jupiter, docked at Rotterdam and began taking on cargo for West Africa too. The ships and their Nazi crews were on their way to Ifni, a small Spanish bite in the Atlantic bulge of French Morocco, to run guns to the 150,000 Moorish tribesmen, followers of the "Blue Sultan" Merebbi Rebbo Mehammedan, who fled there before advancing French troops (TIME, March 26), and to start again France's painful Moroccan wars just after final pacification of Morocco had been announced.

Little Black Schaefer is a famed Ger man agent and gunrunner who speaks Arabic as well as Britain's Colonel Lawrence. He prefers to be known as Sidi Fra Achmed Schaefer Arksis, has been a thorn in French sides since 1911.

At this point London newspapers took up the story. Both the Optimist and the Jupiter belong to a Zurich firm named the Arksis Aksa Co. formed in 1933 "to foster trade with the Sultanate of Mauretania." London's Daily Mail charged that the real owner of Arksis Aksa Co. is Germany's munitions Tycoon Fritz Thyssen, longtime financial backer of Adolf Hitler. The Optimist was once a dispatch boat, known as the Delphin, for the German navy.

All this was reminiscent of an incident that nearly brought on the World War in 1911. Morocco then was an independent country whose neutrality was guaranteed by the Treaty of Algeciras (1906). France and Germany were both developing vast commercial interests there. As last week, Germans were accused of secret gunrunning to Moroccan tribesmen when France marched in and occupied Fez. As last week, Sidi Fra Achmed Schaefer Arksis was supposed to be involved. Only 100 mi. from Ifni, where the former warship Delphin was theoretically bound last week, is the harbor of Agadir. There in 1911 anchored the German warship Panther "to protect German interests." For many days war was very close.

True or false, the Nazi gunrunning story was taken sufficiently seriously in Madrid last week for the Spanish Government, on France's request, to order a Spanish gunboat and airplanes to Ifni and to transfer troops there from the Ceuta on the Straits of Gibraltar.

"The story is too ridiculous even to issue an official denial," cried the German Foreign Office. "News of this kind appears periodically in foreign newspapers for the obvious purpose of discrediting Germany."

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