Vienna, April — undated

“Would you like to talk to Paris?” said young Captain Clapp to me the other day.

“I should say I would,” was my answer, “but, of course, it is impossible.” (Telegrams were greatly delayed and letters rarely reached me and always many days old. Lacking definite instructions, I was in something of a quandary.) Clapp is a telephone expert attached to the Hoover organization and, as it turned out, something of a miracle worker.

“Nothing is easier,” explained young Clapp. “We have a perfect connection with Paris via Cologne. I established it some ten days ago, but we have to be very secretive about it because if it were known the authorities ‘here or there’ might take it into their heads to interrupt it. We are working entirely through subordinates, telephone men like myself, and we are in agreement to send no military information.”

That was not a handicap for me. I had no military information to send. Within twenty minutes I was talking to House at the Crillon and our conversation was as clear as if I had been talking from Versailles. This system of clandestine grapevine communication was a great resource to me in the following days and I hope it did not prove too great a nuisance to the Colonel.