Handwriting on the Wall

Lowering their faces under their flaring headdresses, the nuns browsing among the pious tracts in the little store silently shook their heads when Shopkeeper Armand Bertele offered to help them. The figures in nun's garb had reason for silence: they were in reality male counter-intelligence agents of France's formidable Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, and they were more interested in baldish, Austrian-born Armand Bertele's comings and goings than in commentaries and chaplets.

For three months black-gowned agents loitered over Armand's bookstalls, in the Paris suburbs of Fontenay-sous-Bois, watching their prey. Others, pretending to collect alms in the neighborhood, used minicameras to photograph his visitors. D.S.T. men with movie cameras filmed his regular rendezvous with another man in Paris' lonely Rue Botzaris. They noticed that before each clandestine meeting he chalked the letter k on a nearby wall.

Finally the police--no longer dressed as nuns--moved in. As they arrested Bertele on the street corner, he tried to rub out the k, confessed later at D.S.T. headquarters that a clean k was an all-clear signal, a smudged letter meant danger. The police went to the next rendezvous, inscribed a clear k on the wall, and seized Kazimierz Dopierala, a secretary at the Polish embassy, when he trustingly showed up.

In Bertele's shop police found a highly efficient miniature radio and a collection of documents coded in wartime Resistance fashion, e.g., "The child of the desert goes well. He will come as arranged." Last week, in publicly charging Bertele (real name: Herman Boisselle), his wife Felicie. and Dopierala with collecting and transmitting secret military information "to an Eastern state," the D.S.T. made it clear that they had tripped up a Communist spy ring operating in NATO's capital.

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