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“What the dickens does the editor of the Calgary Herald want in my young life?" I soon found out! He said, “I'm afraid that I have some bad news for you, Mr. Cerf. Your Mr. Dupre has just collapsed and confessed that his entire story was a hoax. There wasn't a word of truth to it. These are all things that he read in various stories and spy magazines. He spent the War sitting at a desk in a London office, and never got out of London in his whole life. This whole business of the torture and the underground stuff was just his imagination and stories that he had read someplace. He couldn't stand the strain any longer. His conscience was bothering him. He was a nice little man, and he didn't realize that his deception was going to be blown up to these dimensions. He was just romancing a little bit and suddenly he found himself a national hero! We're printing the whole story tomorrow morning. I thought I'd give you a little advance notice.”

Well, the only pleasure that I got out of this was breaking the news to DeWitt Wallace. After all, it was he who had put Quent on to Dupre's trail. I called up Wally and told him of the imminent Dupre expose. Wally groaned, “Oh, my god, what are we going to do now?" I said, “Well, I've had a little time to think about this. There's only one way out for us. We're the patsies here. Imagine this little Canadian country boy fooling the entire Canadian government, not to mention Readers‘Digest, Quentin Reynolds and Random House! The only way that we can get out of this is to try to laugh it off. I'm going to call a press conference tomorrow. I'm going to