It happened in the late fall of 1939
when, after a Nazi submarine had penetrated the British sea defense around the
Firth of Forth and damaged a British cruiser, Reston and a colleague contrived
to get the news past British censorship. They cabled a series of seemingly
harmless sentences to The Times's editors in New York, having first sent a
message instructing the editors to regard only the last word of each sentence.
Thus they were able to convey enough words to spell out the story. The fact that
the news of the submarine attack was printed in New York before it had appeared
in the British press sparked a big controversy that led to an investigation by
Scotland Yard and British Military Intelligence. But it took the investigators
eight weeks to decipher The Times's reporters' code, an embarrassingly slow bit
of detective work, and when it was finally solved the incident had given the
story very prominent play, later expressed dismay that the reporters had risked
so much for so little. And the incident left Reston deeply distressed. It was so
out of character for him to have. become involved in such a thing. The tactics
were questionable and, though the United States was not yet in the war, Britain
was already established as America's close ally and breaking British censorship
seemed both an irresponsible and unpatriotic thing to
do.
单选题
The episode recounted in the passage took place ______.