ct with the Soviet Union--something Hitler has been
unsuccessfully trying to accomplish for a long time. At the moment it
appears that Great Britain will succeed just as she has already
succeeded in breaking the Czechoslovakian-Soviet pact--another rupture
Hitler was determined upon.

England has a reputation for shrewd diplomacy. In the past she has
used nations and peoples, played one against the other, betrayed,
sacrificed, double-crossed in the march of her empire. Since the
Cliveden week-end, however, with its resultant intrigues, England has,
to all appearances, finally double-crossed herself.

Those who guide her destiny and the destinies of her millions of
subjects have apparently come to the conclusion that democracy, as
England has known it, cannot survive and that it is a choice between
fascism and communism. Under communism, the ruling class to which the
Cliveden week-end guests belong, stand to lose their wealth and power.
It is the fatuous hope of the economic royalists that under fascism
they will still sit on top of the roost, and so the Cliveden
week-enders move toward fascism.

Hitler's Fifth Column finds strange allies.

III

_France's Secret Fascist Army_

Neither Hitler nor Mussolini could have foreseen the development of a
Cliveden set or England's willingness to weaken her own position as
the dominant European power by sacrificing Austria and a good portion
of Czechoslovakia. The totalitarian powers proceeded on the assumption
that when the struggle for control of central Europe, the Balkans and
the Mediterranean came they would have to fight.

The Rome-Berlin axis reasoned logically that if, when the expected war
broke out, France could be disrupted by a widespread internal
rebellion, not only would she be weakened on the battlefield but
fascism might even be victorious in the Republic. In preparation for
this, the axis sent into France secret agents plentifully supplied
with money and arms, and almost succeeded in one of the most amazing
plots in history.

The opening scene of events which led directly to the discovery of how
far the foreign secret agents had progressed took place in the
Restaurant Drouant on the Place Gaillon which is frequented by leaders
of Paris' financial, industrial and cultural life.

Precisely at noon, on September 10, 1937, Jacqueline Blondet, an
eighteen-year-old stenographer with marcelled hair, sparkling eyes,
and heavily rouged lips, passed thr