Illegal Transmitter

An FCC secret leaked into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last week. Thinking it over, FCC didn't much mind. The story did credit to FCC, and it certainly gave no comfort to the enemy.

In each State FCC has at least one monitoring station. Each FCC station has at least one mobile unit (e.g., a truck) in which suspicious transmission can be reconnoitered. Several hundred illegal sending sets were extinguished by this system in 1941. Some were not merely illegal but dangerous.

A few days before Japan attacked the U.S. an FCC monitor in Oregon heard a new and interesting short-wave signal: no message, just two-and three-letter calls. Promptly all monitoring stations in the U.S. began to listen for it. Directional measurements were taken in Texas, in Nebraska, in Georgia, in Massachusetts, in Maryland. Triangulations were worked out. By the time the transmitter began sending messages--in code--FCC knew about where it was. It was about in the German Embassy.

Then, as the Post-Dispatch's Marquis W. Childs reported last week, the State Department restrained the FBI from moving in. The gumshoes, it was thought, might upset negotiations with Germany for safe exchange of diplomatic personnel. But when Germany's Hans Thomsen and friends departed to take a little rest in West Virginia, the transmitter stopped. To the Post-Dispatch story, FCC last week added two definitive points: 1) every message sent had been decoded; 2) the Embassy sender had been neatly jammed the moment it started sending messages.

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