Hitler's Lost Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

networks within Britain, and assisting requests similar to that for Annette received a lower priority.
    An allied nation’s request to neutral countries for personal histories on suspects may be stalled, or simply ignored. This was often the result for requests to those neutral countries ‘friendly’ to Germany at the beginning of the war – Spain, Switzerland and Sweden. Even Allied nations, without an urgency attachment, would provide such information on a low importance basis. A war is being fought and military intelligence resources have higher urgencies than researching the activities of suspected overseas spies – many of whom could eventually be determined as harmless, and with others ending inconclusively. There may be thousands of such cases and it is likely that most requests for an individual’s background details would not receive the attention hoped for by those soliciting the request.
    There would be exceptions, of course, but these would only be cases producing a high-grade risk profile.  Annette Wagner’s security risk profile, when she arrived in Australia in March 1938, had nothing in it to be suspicious about.
    Spying for the Emperor
    The commencement of World War I nominally brought Japan to the Allied side, and while world attention was focused on Europe, the German island possessions in the Southwest Pacific were occupied by the Japanese navy. The Versailles Conference cautiously initialled Japan’s occupation of the Mariana, Caroline and Marshal island groups. The League of Nations formally granted a conditional mandate over the territories to Japan, but the binding rules were effectively ignored and the Japanese proceeded during the 1920s to develop the islands for both commercial and military purposes.
    At the Versailles Conference, Japan also claimed the former German territory of New Guinea. Had this been agreed to, the Japanese Empire would have reached virtually to Australia’s front door by sharing a border with Papua, a short distance from the Australian continent. A very apprehensive Australian government successfully argued that Japanese control of former German colonies in the Pacific should not extend south of the equator.
    The escalation of Japanese sabre-rattling in Asia and the country’s military preparations in the Pacific revealed the classification difficulty incurred by most intelligence organisations. This derives from the question ‘What is the tangible differentiation between information gathered by foreign nationals of a general, and harmless nature, and strategic information relevant to the host nation’s security?’ This strategic information could be military, geographic, commercial or scientific. Australia’s increasing uneasiness with the growth of Japanese militarism in Asia and the Pacific during the 1930s resulted in an urgency within Australian Military Intelligence in determining precisely what information the Japanese were acquiring.
    The serious interest in collecting Australian information began in the 1890s when Japanese expeditions travelled extensively to Western countries, observing and recording with an unlimited resolve. It would appear that this was no more than the Japanese endeavours at the time to amass comprehensive country information that would have little, if any, military significance.
    Following World War I, uneasiness in Australia increased as Japanese research and information gathering moved from compiling data on ‘general’ issues to appraisals of the coastline, harbours, shipping and soundings taken in a number of waterways. The lack of association between the information collected, compared to what may have been reasonably expected for activities by a friendly nation, became increasingly difficult to ignore.
    During the 1930s, security concerns around Japanese intentions increased in Australia. This was attributed to both Japan’s aggressive foreign policy and an increase in