Switzerland last week furnished the first notable spy trial of World War II. A brunette dancer called Nina (real name: Virginia Capt Rota), arrested at the frontier as she sought to enter France last month, was found guilty of possessing Swiss anti-aircraft defense secrets. She was supposedly to deliver them by roundabout route to Italy. She was sentenced to five years in jail. With her were convicted Roger Joël, former draftsman in a Swiss arms plant; Paul Rochat, a Geneva detective, and Rochat's wife Dolly. In jail, Dancer Nina hunger-struck and tried suicide (wrist-slitting).
These malefactors were small potatoes in the international game of espionage. Had they been large potatoes their capture would likely have been kept secret. Certainly Nina, though similarly beauteous and professionally equipped, was no Mata Hari (Eye of the Morning). That curvesome celebrity of World War I did business in official secrets on a grand scale. Maltreated Dutch wife of a bibulous Scottish captain in the Dutch colonial forces, she went on the stage in Paris in 1905, passing as part Javanese, with a performance of muscular bravura learned in Java. She became France's leading courtesan, sought, kept and highly feed by eminent members of the diplomatic set. French agents saw her in Berlin the day hostilities began, riding triumphantly with Chief of Police Jagow. (He had originally called on her to complain about her dancing naked in a Berlin night club, remained to engage her for the German Intelligence.) Back in France, she continued leading her conspicuous life, apparently unafraid. The French knew she was spying but could pin nothing on her. They decided to deport her, whereat she broke down and offered to spy for France. They sent her to Belgium to work on General Moritz von Bissing, the German military governor. She proceeded from there to London where she told the British Intelligence Service she was in France's pay to spy on Britain. The B. I. S. advised her to stop, let her go to Spain, where she was soon seen again in the company of German agents. They sent her back to France and there, in 1916, the French caught her with Germany's check for 15,000 pesetas ($3,000) in her pocket. At her trial she contended this money, like other payments traced to her, was only the price of her love, taken by her lovers out of their espionage expense money. She said she really spied on the Germans for France. She was shot.
Nowadays France and Britain are said not to use women spies, believing them unreliable. France claims that the German Intelligence has stooped to hiring dope fiends, whom it supplies with dope, then makes desperate and ready to do anything by cutting off the supply. An ex-spy of higher type believed working now for Berlin is Norman Baillie-Stewart, Seaforth Highlander lieutenant who was convicted in 1933 of selling military secrets and imprisoned in the Tower of London until 1937, when good behavior ended his five-year sentence and he exiled himself from Great Britain. The London Evening News stated positively last month that Baillie-Stewart was broadcasting propaganda in English from a German station.