Word: provocateur
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...initials U.S.S.R. against the blue. Up went six slow Austrian army planes in pursuit. Audaciously the skywriter jazzed the municipal airport, disappeared, leaving the army flyers to their humiliation, the populace to speculate on the motive for the deed. Some patriots thought the scribbling pilot was a German agent provocateur sent up to bolster the Nazi thesis that Czechoslovakia is a "Bolshevik outpost." Best explanation: an unreconstructed Austrian Red commemorating Vienna's abortive Socialist-Communist counterrevolution of February...
...North China last week another of these Japanese Puzzles was in the making. Army chiefs moved Japanese forces in overwhelming numbers down to the Great Wall. The Army's master-spy and agent provocateur, Major General Kenji Doihara, had everything set for five Chinese provinces to secede as a unit from the Nanking Government and set themselves up as "autonomous" under the muzzles of Japanese guns. Abruptly this scheme was spoiled by the Japanese Ambassador to China, grinning Mr. Akira Ariyoshi, who had a three-hour conversation with brisk little Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, after which the Chinese satraps...
Righteously the Canton Association for Relief and Assistance to Volunteers [against Japan] shipped 50,000 Canton dollars to "encourage" War Lord Feng. This was too much for the Nankingers who promptly charged Feng with being at the same time 1) an agent provocateur for Japan and 2) an agent of Soviet Russia which was supposed to be sending him munitions...
...TIME, July 22, 1929). After a trial somewhat embarrassing internationally, in which Reporter Knickerbocker was star witness for the prosecution, M. Orloff was convicted of forgery, sentenced to jail. Rather surprisingly, Defense Attorney Walter Jaffe said of Witness Knickerbocker after the trial: "I shall never call his an agent provocateur again. I shall call him spiritus rectus: the Upright Spirit of the trial...
What happened later to change Herr Jaffe's mind is not recorded. But in Berlin last week Reporter Knickerbocker won a court injunction, forerunner of a libel suit, against a book just published: Murderers, Counterfeiters & Provocateurs, by Vladimir Orloff. In a preface to his client's volume, Herr Jaffe stated that M. Orloff had been forced into his crime by an agent provocateur in the person of Reporter Knickerbocker...