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Show COLUMNIST AIRS ODD STATE FACTS own world-wide news service, ' not relying on what It reads in the papers. The correspondents are the U. S. diplomats in the various countries. . . . The cablegrams cable-grams sent and received by the dep't cost the government about 1700 a day. . . . The state dep't is even older than the government. '(Originally called the department of foreign affairs. It was in operation, opera-tion, before the constitution.) . . . Benjamin Franklin was the founder found-er of American diplomacy and the smartest diplomat the U. S. ever had. Tke secretary of state is the only cabinet officer who doesn't have ' ' to report to congress he's responsible respon-sible only to the president. (He doesn't even have to furnish Information Infor-mation to congress when they request re-quest it if he feels it would be "incompatible with the public interest.") in-terest.") . . . Secretary Hull sees the president less than most of the other cabinet members. Walter Vinchell Things I Never Knew Til Now About the State Department The state department is America's first line of defense, winning friends abroad, safeguarding our peace and looking after our diplomatic diplo-matic and commercial lnterests-yet lnterests-yet it costs each American citizen only 12 cents a year to keep it going! . . . The department has' Its own Intelligence service. (Members (Mem-bers are taken from their regular jobs and are assigned to track down information which, for diplomatic diplo-matic reasons, can't be turned over to the G-men or police). . . . The hokus-pokus surrounding diplomatic diplo-matic pouches is more' tradition than anything else. The state department de-partment sends all messages of any importance via cable. (The diplomatic diplo-matic pouches, which are so carefully care-fully sealed and locked, contain mostly newspapers and pamphlets). All state department cables are sent In code, and one, of the miracles mira-cles of the age is the department's code machine, which the public will get a glimpse of for the first time In Warner's "Espionage Agent," a timely flicker. The machine, ma-chine, which looks like a huge typewriter, type-writer, automatically codes and decodes de-codes messages. ... To send a message in code, the operator merely types it out on the large keyboard. Decoding a message is even simpler insert the message dial at the side, press a button, and the keys automatically leap up and down, typing out the translation. trans-lation. . . . The machine was only recently perfected, after 18 years of experimentation, at a cost of more than a million dollars. . . . It offers a variation of 273Z original origi-nal codes, with a separate "key" for each code. . . . The machine is practically 100 per cent spyproof, as it is useless unless the "key" to the message is known, which would give inquisitive outsiders 2731 chances of being wrong. The state department maintains |