A Taste for Treason, Part 2: Agent Crown

True Spies, Episode 170 - A Taste for Treason, Part 2: Agent Crown

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Sophia Di Martino and this is True Spies from SPYSCAPE Studios.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They court-martialled him. They tied him to a stake in a ditch outside Toulon Naval Dockyard and they shot him by firing squad. 

NARRATOR: A Taste for Treason, Part 2: Agent Crown. We’re in Scotland in the summer of 1937 and German spy Jessie Jordan is in a world of trouble. She doesn’t know it yet, but British intelligence is reading her mail. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: MI5 and MI6 just decided to keep a watching brief on this mail and see what turned up.

NARRATOR: A native of Glasgow, Jessie had married a German, and lived in Germany for most of her adult life. She’d returned to Britain in the spring of ‘37 hoping to find proof of her Aryan ancestry - proof that would allow her, her child, and her grandchild to stay on good terms with the Nazi authorities. She’d also agreed to spy for them, sending back photographs of military installations on the coast.

ANDREW JEFFREY: It was very amateurish stuff.

NARRATOR: Amateurish is right. On one occasion, Jessie accidentally leaves her name on a re-used envelope, which is then intercepted by MI5, Britain’s domestic security service.

ANDREW JEFFREY: I mean, it's not exactly high-class tradecraft, this.

NARRATOR: You see, the German address she’s sending her dispatches to has already been betrayed by a British double agent - a stunt pilot and jobbing actor called Christopher Draper. And that means that… 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Any mail leaving the UK to that address was automatically stopped, steamed open, photographed, resealed, and sent on its way. 

NARRATOR: But before long, she’s moved on, establishing a more permanent base as a hairdresser in the Scottish port city of Dundee. MI5 loses sight of Jessie but her extracurricular activities in service of Nazi Germany continue.

ANDREW JEFFREY: She was designed to act as a cutout between the agent and the spymaster in Germany.

NARRATOR: In other words, Jessie Jordan is a proxy. Other agents under the command of the Abwehr - German military intelligence - send reports from far-flung locales to her hairdresser’s salon on Kinloch Street, Dundee. From there, she forwards them to her handler in Hamburg. MI5 might well be photographing these messages as they leave the country - but they don’t know who’s sending them. But somebody is on to Jessie. Her name’s Mary Curran, one of Jessie’s employees at the salon. Mary suspects that the glamorous, German-accented hairdresser might be a spy. But nobody - not least her husband, John - takes her seriously. Not until…

ANDREW JEFFREY: She found a scrap of paper. And on this scrap of paper was one word, ‘Zeppelin’, and a series of numerals.

NARRATOR: When another scrap of paper is found at the hairdressers - this time showing a hand-drawn map of a mysterious military installation - the Currans raise their suspicions with local police. The police travel overnight to London, where they meet with MI5 spycatcher Edward Hinchley Cooke.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And Cooke, to the policeman's great surprise, said, “Oh, that's Mrs. Jessie Jordan. We know about her.”

NARRATOR: Now, Jessie is back on MI5’s radar and the seeds of an explosive spycatching operation have been sown. In this second episode of A Taste for Treason, intelligence historian Andrew Jeffrey is our guide to an incredible chain of events that culminated in the unmasking of a Nazi spy network. Tasked with preparing Germany for a coming war, these spies operated on both sides of the Atlantic, buying, stealing, or coaxing military secrets from under their enemies’ noses. Some of them weren’t very good at it but you can hear all about that in Part One of this story. Go back and listen if you haven’t already. It takes us from London to Germany, over to New York, and back to Dundee where Jessie Jordan is about to run clean out of luck.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Mail interception was the primary means of keeping tabs on enemy agents. In the case of Jessie Jordan, the mail interception was carried out by a postman in Dundee by the name of Alexander Jack. He'd signed the Official Secrets Act and he'd been given the very latest technology for opening and photographing letters. He'd been given, of course, a camera. He'd been given a kettle. And he'd been given a sharp knife. And that was it.

NARRATOR: More low-tech than you might expect, no? Well, in the 1930s, the nuts and bolts of spycraft weren’t nearly as polished as they are today.

ANDREW JEFFREY: I think it's worth saying here that you would imagine that MI5 probably had some great big depot somewhere that was intercepting all this mail staffed by eagle-eyed people in eyeshades with powerful lights and big cameras and so on. You'd imagine that you'd be entirely wrong because MI5 had a total operational staff of 15 officers at this time. It was a tiny, underfunded organization. There were actually only two German specialists in MI5 at this point, one of whom was Edward Hinchley Cooke.

NARRATOR: From his office in London, Hinchley Cooke gratefully receives photographs of the letters. They are not in short supply. One of the first things the intercept on Kinloch Street reveals is a stream of letters from an Abwehr agent in New York who signs his name as ‘Mister Crown’.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Now, the Agent Crown letters, really, when MI5 saw them, they were so amateurish - they were so almost childish in their content - that MI5 quickly realized they presented no real threat to American security. 

NARRATOR: The Agent Crown letters detail the anonymous writer’s ideas for a number of poorly thought-out schemes.

ANDREW JEFFREY: So they didn't tell the Americans about them at first because what the Agent Crown letters were doing was providing a window on Abwehr's activities. That was until January 1938. 

NARRATOR: As the mid-winter chill freezes London to the bone, MI5 receives a letter of substance.

ANDREW JEFFREY: This letter, intercepted at the beginning of January, detailed Crown's plan along with several unnamed accomplices to lure an American Army officer, Colonel Henry Eglin, to a bogus staff meeting in the McAlpin Hotel in New York City. He was there to be relieved forcibly of defense plans for part of the Eastern seaboard of the US.

NARRATOR: The MI5 duty officer who first sets eyes on Agent Crown’s latest is quick to raise the alarm.

ANDREW JEFFREY: He immediately called in his boss, the director general of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell. Kell took one look at this, [and] realized two things. One, that a man's life was in danger, or certainly he was in danger of injury. But also, that this was a much more serious letter from Crown. It did represent a potential breach in American security.

NARRATOR: Within a matter of hours, the American military attache in London, Raymond Lee, is informed of the German plot against Colonel Henry Eglin.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Lee went straight back to the embassy and sent off ciphered telegrams to Washington describing this and suggesting that Colonel Eglin be warned not to attend any meetings in New York. The result of all of this was that 48 hours after MI5 had steamed open Jesse Johnson's letter in Scotland, a top-level meeting took place in the FBI’s New York field office in the Justice Building on Foley Square. And the search for Agent Crown was on.

NARRATOR: But the FBI has almost nothing to go on.

ANDREW JEFFREY: MI5 had given them very little other than this precis of the letter and the name Crown. 

NARRATOR: From the contents of the letter, the FBI posits that their suspect might be an American ex-serviceman of German extraction. But that hardly narrows the field. There are thousands, if not millions of Americans with blood ties to Germany and Austria.

ANDREW JEFFREY: So they were really stuck waiting for Crown to make a mistake. 

NARRATOR: Fortunately, they wouldn’t wait long.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Just two weeks later, in the passport office in New York City, the passport officer there, Ira Hoyt, took a very strange phone call from a man identifying himself as Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State. 

NARRATOR: The supposed ‘Secretary of State’ has a strange request to make of the passport officer.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And this Cordell Hull told Hoyt that he was to deliver 35 blank US passports to him under an assumed name at the Taft Hotel.

NARRATOR: Ira Hoyt is instantly suspicious...

ANDREW JEFFREY: Because there had been a very high profile recent case of passport fraud in New York involving, among others, Soviet agents and Lucky Luciano, to name but two.

NARRATOR: Ever vigilant against communist spies, legendary mobsters, and other sundry enemies of the state, Passport Officer Ira Hoyt makes a few calls.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Hoyt got on the phone and discovered very quickly that Cordell Hull was actually in Washington at the time and was nowhere near New York. 

NARRATOR: The simple, childish ruse has been easily uncovered. Now, Hoyt can turn the tables.

ANDREW JEFFREY: So he called in State Department agents who made up a dummy parcel supposedly containing these passports and left it in the Taft Hotel.

NARRATOR: Before long, a Western Union courier has been tasked by the mysterious caller to collect the dummy package from the Taft Hotel. By now, State Department agents have briefed the courier service. Every time that package moves, they’ll know about it. In an attempt at counter-surveillance, the recipient of the package asks Western Union to shunt it between a few different locations before it reaches its final destination.

ANDREW JEFFREY: There followed this most bizarre chase around the streets of midtown Manhattan with Western Union couriers and various others involved.

NARRATOR: Eventually, the suspect redirects the delivery to the Kings Castle Tavern, on Hudson Street. It’s here that the agents first lock eyes on their target. He’s a dark-haired man, watching the courier closely as he enters the bar.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And it was outside the King's Castle Tavern that the State Department agents and NYPD arrested this man impersonating Cordell Hull.

NARRATOR: When the agents search the man’s briefcase, what they find almost beggars belief. Talk about luck - or stupidity.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They discovered in his briefcase an exact copy of the message that had been sent to Jessie Jordan in Scotland, describing the plot to kidnap Colonel Eglin. Here was a direct link. And here was Agent Crown. It had to be Agent Crown.

NARRATOR: This man’s name, it turns out, is Guenther Rumrich. Born in Chicago to an Austro-Hungarian diplomatic family, he’d spent most of his early life in Germany and Czechoslovakia, before returning to the US as an adult in 1929 - just in time for the Great Depression. He’d enlisted in the US Army a year later, in which he served - with varying levels of dedication - until 1935. At first, Rumrich claims that he was asked to secure the passports by a mysterious man he’d met at a bar. This was an outright lie. He’d actually volunteered as a spy for the Abwehr in 1936 by writing to a German newspaper with intelligence connections. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: He was a fantasist primarily, but he nevertheless was recruited as an agent by Abwehr in New York. 

NARRATOR: His handler, Hilmar Dierks was also the Hamburg-based spymaster behind Jessie Jordan and a number of other agents. After Rumrich’s arrest, his case is picked up by the FBI.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Rumrich was handed over to Special Agent Leon Turrou for interrogation.

NARRATOR: Leon Turrou was a man with layers. He was born Leon Turovsky in 1885 - a native of Poland. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: He was an extraordinary character. His fascinating background still to this day is really opaque. He would claim, for example, that he had served in the US Marines in World War I. This hardly squares with the fact that we know he was in Vladivostok because we have his marriage lines. 

NARRATOR: Much of what Turrou said about his background was economical with the truth. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: What we do know is that after the First World War and briefly serving in the US Marines, he was involved in a very dodgy smuggling operation and in and out of what became the Soviet Union. And he then found his way into the FBI. He didn't have the law degree that Hoover said was a minimum qualification for recruitment into the Bureau. But he did have five languages. So he was very useful to the Bureau. He was involved in a number of high-profile cases, including not least the Lindbergh baby kidnap case. Then he became involved in the German spy case.

NARRATOR: Turrou’s first task? Interrogating Rumrich.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Rumrich proved very easy to break down.

NARRATOR: When pressed, Rumrich reveals that, in 1937, he began to meet regularly with an Abwehr courier named Karl Schluter. Two years previously, Schluter had worked with another German agent, Wilhem Lonkowski - whose brief and inglorious career we covered in the first part of this story. Schluter’s job was to collect intelligence from agents in New York and bring it back to Germany. His cover was that of a steward aboard the ocean liner Europa. But at the time of Rumrich’s arrest, Karl Schluter was on holiday. His assistant, a woman named Johanna Hoffman, was sailing on the Europa undercover as a hairdresser. It’s her name that Rumrich gives Leon Turrou.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Johanna Hoffman was due in New York in the next few days aboard the liner Europa. FBI agents were waiting for Hoffman as soon as she stepped ashore and she was picked up, arrested, and taken in for interrogation. 

NARRATOR: During her interrogation with Turrou, Hoffman denies that she ever had any contact with a ‘Guenther Rumrich’. At Turrou’s signal, Rumrich is brought into the room. “Hallo, Jenni,” he said. The game was up.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Between the witness statements of Johanna Hoffman and Rumrich, the FBI was able to round up the entire New York ring. In particular, they were able to round up Ignatz Griebl. 

NARRATOR: Dr. Ignatz Griebl - another familiar face from Part One. An obstetrician and part-time propagandist for the Nazis in America, Griebl was adept at whipping up a crowd and recruiting sub-agents for the New York spy network. It had been Griebl who had spirited the hapless Wilhelm Lonkowski out of the country and back to Germany when his cover had been blown. Now, thanks to Rumrich, the doctor himself was under suspicion.

ANDREW JEFFREY: He was taken in for questioning by Turrou. His office was searched and various things were found there including files on prominent Jews in American political life and industrialists, and so on. But they also found in Griebl's office a Norddeutsche Lloyd shipping line matchbook. 

NARRATOR: The Norddeutsche Lloyd shipping company owned the Europa, and its sister ship, the SS Bremen. Inside the branded matchbook, Griebl had scratched a simple letter substitution code. It was of the kind used by the other agents in the New York network, including Rumrich. The code - and the link to Schluter and Hoffman’s place of work - are not enough to formally convict Griebl. Under interrogation, he does his best to appear as an innocent witness who, through his political activism, has come into contact with some unsavory characters.

ANDREW JEFFREY: He sang like a bird, or so it seemed. He proceeded to incriminate just about everyone and every German American he'd come into contact with, most of whom were totally innocent. 

NARRATOR: By the spring of 1938, the FBI was preparing to try the Nazi spies in court.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Johanna Hoffmann was in custody. So was Rumrich and others were either under arrest or about to be arrested. 

NARRATOR: A case of this magnitude is hard to keep under wraps. News of the impending spy trials leaks to the press. Back across the Atlantic, MI5 quietly fumes. Clearly, the Americans are no good at keeping secrets. The British Security Service knows that it’s only a matter of time before the news reaches Jessie Jordan, the Abwehr cut-out in Scotland.

ANDREW JEFFREY: As soon as the American case was leaked to the press, there was no point in keeping any surveillance on her. She had no value after that because her Nazi contacts had been exposed in the US press. So the decision was taken to arrest her. 

NARRATOR: At 11 am on Wednesday, March 2, Dundee police constable Annie Ross strolls along Kinloch Street. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: One of only two policewomen in Dundee at the time, Annie Ross was sent in to make an appointment for a perm. 

NARRATOR: But a hairdo is the last thing on her mind.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Her real mission, in fact, was to check that Jessie was on the premises. Having made the appointment, she turned around, walked out the door, and signaled to a large black police car.

NARRATOR: The car speeds up the street. Its passengers, flushed with purpose, leap out of the vehicle. MI5 spycatcher Edward Hinchley Cooke, accompanied by the chief constable and two detectives, stalks onto the shop floor. Jessie Jordan is arrested on the spot.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Mary Curran chose that moment to turn up at the shop, partly to go to work, but partly also to arrange with Jessie that they were going to go to a dance the following night. Mary was roundly told to go away by policewoman Annie Ross and to speak to nobody.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, in New York, the Nazi Spy Ring case steams ahead - ably abetted by an all-too-willing Ignatz Griebl.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Griebl, however, was still being treated for some reason as a friendly witness, a prosecution witness, in effect. But his lies were catching up to him. Day by day, it was being shown that all those he was implicating - German-Americans he was implicating in this in New York and beyond - were in fact, innocent. They'd maybe been approached to become spies and had rebuffed these approaches, but they were certainly innocent. 

NARRATOR: Sensing that his helpful facade is about to slip for good, Griebl decides to cut his losses.

ANDREW JEFFREY: So the night before the Grand Jury was sworn in, he drove down to see a patient in Greenwich Village.

NARRATOR: Griebl’s wife, Maria, accompanies him on this home visit. After he has administered to his patient, the pair drive back north. But Herr und Frau Griebl take an unusual route home. Under the flicker of gaslights, the pair cruise toward Pier 86, on the North River… 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Where he parked the car, his Buick Sedan. 

NARRATOR: By the pier, the SS Bremen bobs gently on the dark water. Griebl tells Maria that there is somebody aboard the ship that he needs to see. He scurries up the gangway, and she waits. And waits. And he never came back.

ANDREW JEFFREY: His wife was sitting in the passenger seat in the car and she didn't drive, so she had to get someone to take her home. This was in the dead of night. Griebl, however, had escaped. 

NARRATOR: When the FBI hear of the doctor's un-gallant departure, they do their level best to bring the SS Bremen back to port. But the Captain refuses. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: And Griebl made it back to Germany. However, [he] left four people behind to be tried by the Grand Jury. Johanna Hoffman, Rumrich, of course, and two others: Otto Foss, who had been a Lonkowski informant and had also worked with Griebl, and another very low-grade spy.

NARRATOR: When sentences are handed down in late 1938, the defendants each receive between two and six years in prison. In Scotland, Jessie Jordan - whose guilt was never in doubt - was quickly jailed for four. Ignatz Griebl remained a fugitive in Europe until he was arrested in 1945. And you might expect that to be the end of it. But you’d be wrong.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Well, MI5 had not really told the Americans the whole truth when they passed on the information about the plot to kidnap Colonel Eglin. They omitted to tell the Americans that, that same day, they had received another letter that had been posted to Jessie Jordan and intercepted at the Scottish Post Office and that this letter was from Agent Crown's brother and that his name was Gustav Rumrich. 

NARRATOR: If the British had shared this intel with the Americans,  Guenther Rumrich might have been caught within a matter of hours. They’d certainly have been spared their parcel-chasing adventure around Midtown Manhattan.

ANDREW JEFFREY: But the British were very keen to protect their sources. They didn't want the Jesse Jordan case blown sky-high while she was producing very useful information on Abwehr and its methodology, such as it was.

NARRATOR: Guenther’s brother, Gustav, was a chemistry student in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: And he was offering himself as an agent to Abwehr because he basically had no money and he needed the cash to complete his studies. It was as simple as that. That was his sole motivation. So he was left in place by MI5 until the case blew in America, and Jesse Jordan was arrested in Scotland. 

NARRATOR: After the arrests, MI5 no longer had reason to guard this information. They pass it on to MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And then in a very carefully coordinated operation, the MI6 head of station in Prague told the Czechs about Gustav Rumrich, this cuckoo in their midst, who is offering to spy for Abwehr. 

NARRATOR: The Czechs act quickly, arresting Gustav on March 3, 1938 - just one day after Jessie Jordan met her fate in Dundee.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They learned from him under interrogation that he had been given two Abwehr contact addresses. One was Mrs. Jessie Jordan in Scotland. The other was a Mrs. Gertrude Brandy in Booterstown in Dublin. 

NARRATOR: Well, you didn’t think that Jessie was the Abwehr’s only proxy, did you? When the Czechs inform MI5 of the Dublin connection, they know they can’t act directly against Mrs. Brandy. The Republic of Ireland, still a new country, is emphatically outside British control.

ANDREW JEFFREY: But they could stop her mail as it passed through Britain on its way to Ireland.

NARRATOR: Fortunately, at this time, much of Ireland’s mail still passes through British sorting offices. An intercept on the Dublin address is put in place by MI5. Once again, the game is on.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And from that they discovered that Mrs. Brandy was in contact with another Abwehr agent, this time one who appeared to be an officer in the Marine Nationale, the French Navy. 

NARRATOR: This treacherous seaman had sent Mrs. Brandy a postcard from Tahiti, in French Polynesia. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: And on that postcard was a very telling phrase. And it simply said that the agent who signed himself ‘Charles’ - Charles in English, but Charles had stamp collections to send to Mrs. Brandy - in other words, Abwehr - on his return.

NARRATOR: The phrase ‘Stamp Collections’ had been an Abwehr euphemism for secret intelligence for years. Using it here was sloppy tradecraft - all the better for the Brits. But once again, MI5 decides to hold their cards close. With Jessie Jordan out of the picture, Mrs. Brandy offers them a new opportunity to keep tabs on Abwehr operations.

ANDREW JEFFREY: That situation continued until midnight on June 27, 1938, when the MI6 head of station in Paris, Wilfred Dunderdale, contacted a senior officer in the Deuxieme Bureau, one Paul Paillole, and asked for an urgent meeting the following morning. Paillole recalled many years later how he had asked Dunderdale, “Is it serious?” And Dunderdale replied in no uncertain terms, “It is serious.” Just the tone of his voice meant that it was serious.

NARRATOR: What, then, had prompted this change of heart from the British intelligence community?

ANDREW JEFFREY: The meeting took place the following morning. Dunderdale arrived with Edward Hinchley Cooke, MI5 spy catcher, and the pair of them handed over to Paul Paillole a letter, a letter that had been intercepted on its way to Mrs. Brandy in Dublin that had been postmarked in Paris. It contained four closely written sheets of information on dispositions of the French fleet in the Mediterranean 

NARRATOR: This is about as far from the usual harebrained Abwehr chicken feed as you’re likely to find. We’re talking about serious, strategic intelligence in the hands of an increasingly powerful and belligerent Nazi state.

ANDREW JEFFREY: War was, for all intents and purposes, imminent in Europe.

NARRATOR: In the event of war, the Suez Canal - a key Allied sea route through the Mediterranean to the oil fields of the Middle East - was to be defended by French and British ships. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: It was deadly serious because the information that Agent Charles was handing on to the Germans included the very latest French Naval ciphers. This meant that old French Mediterranean fleet signals were instantly insecure and could be read by the Germans. And not only that. Worse still, was a British ship to signal a French ship in a British Naval code, then the French ship repeat[ed] that same signal verbatim in their insecure codes, this would give the Germans a break into Royal Navy British ciphers. Hundreds, if not thousands of lives were at stake in the event of war. 

NARRATOR: For the Deuxieme Bureau, France’s military intelligence arm, stopping Agent Charles was now a matter of life and death. But how? Beyond the information MI5 had provided, there was precious little to identify the traitor in their midst.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Until the MI5 intercept picked up a letter that showed that Agent Charles had met his Abwehr contact in an Antwerp hotel on a particular weekend at the end of 1937.

NARRATOR: Seizing on the opportunity, the French contacted their counterparts in Belgium. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: And the Belgians literally hoovered up every single hotel registration card for the city of Antwerp for the period of that weekend and handed them over to the French. 

NARRATOR: Narrowing their search to Naval officers, the French discovered that one Enseigne Marc Aubert had checked into the Hotel Century on the weekend in question.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Which is still there, incidentally, right next to Antwerp's main railway station. He'd signed into the Hotel Century using, apparently, his own name, which seemed very odd that the man had not used an alias. So they went to the Navy, and they said, “Look, we've got this guy. We think his name's Marc Aubert. We think he's a German agent.” 

NARRATOR: The French Navy checked their records for every officer with the surname ‘Aubert’. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: There was none of them on the Navy list that could have possibly been in Antwerp on that weekend.

NARRATOR: Mystified, the French Secret Service realized that they had no choice but to go about this the hard way. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: It took two to three months to actually track him down. They had the samples of Charles's handwriting from the British intercepts, and they took those, and they compared them with every Naval officer until they got an exact match. 

NARRATOR: After painstakingly comparing the handwriting against that of hundreds of officers in the Mediterranean fleet, the Deuxieme Bureau finally had a match.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And they discovered that his name was indeed Enseigne Marc Aubert. He was a junior officer serving aboard the destroyer Vauquelin, and the Navy had missed him because they had not thought to check the list of new graduates from the French Naval Academy, the École Naval. 

NARRATOR: Aubert was stationed at Toulon, on Frances’ Mediterranean coast. For a few weeks, the Deuxieme Bureau kept him under close surveillance.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They left them in place but they made sure he couldn't contact anyone outside. They wanted to check who he was in touch with - and all the rest of it - and what lines of communication they had.

NARRATOR: On a gray day in November 1938, Marc Aubert, aka Agent Charles, was alone in his cabin. He was writing.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Two Deuxieme Bureau officers burst into his cabin and caught him in the act of copying out yet another Naval cipher for transmission to the Germans. 

NARRATOR: Enseigne Aubert was in custody and, as war loomed, the French fleet had one less thing to worry about.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They court-martialled him. They tied him to a stake in a ditch outside Toulon Naval dockyard and they shot him by firing squad.

NARRATOR: Marc Aubert wouldn’t be the last French spy to meet this grisly fate.

ANDREW JEFFREY: The aftermath in France was there were a lot of spy scares. Other executions followed. The death penalty had been reintroduced partly for Marc Aubert’s benefit and others found themselves before firing squads.

NARRATOR: And in America, shooting of another kind was underway.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And that was taking place, just as Marc Aubert was being shot in that ditch outside the dockyard in Toulon, that was taking place on a Hollywood soundstage. 

NARRATOR: Okay, let’s rewind for a moment. We’re heading back to New York City; back to the spring of 1938. The Marc Aubert saga is but a twinkle in MI5’s eye, and the world looks on as the Nazi Spy Ring hearings get underway. While the media circus rumbles on, FBI Special Agent Leon Turrou resigns his post citing stress. Understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances. A case like this can take it out of a person. But remember, while Turrou is a brilliant investigator, he’s also liberal with the truth, especially when it comes to his private life.

ANDREW JEFFREY: The real reason for a resignation became apparent within 48 hours, however, when it was revealed that he had sold his story to the New York Post, who were going to produce a series of articles. He'd also sold the story to Random House, who were going to publish a book. And he'd signed a movie deal with Jack and Harry Warner, the movie moguls. Warner Brothers!

NARRATOR: On his way out of the FBI’s New York field office on Foley Square, Leon Turrou took a copy of the case summary that the Bureau had prepared for the Grand Jury hearings. When Turrou’s book, Nazi Spies In America, was released, its contents were surprisingly close to that very document.

ANDREW JEFFREY: The book was an instant bestseller when it came out and then the movie went into production.

NARRATOR: Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy on March 6, 1939 - exactly one month after the execution of Marc Aubert. It was America’s first overtly anti-Nazi film.

ANDREW JEFFREY: The movie sticks very close to the book, apart from a few unconvincing scenes that have been edited for dramatic effect.

NARRATOR: But the true story of this wide-reaching series of operations is so much stranger than fiction. Wouldn’t you agree?

ANDREW JEFFREY: And all this can be traced back to a letter steamed open over a kettle and a Scottish Post Office. 

NARRATOR: I’m Sophia Di Martino. You've heard a condensed version of this story. For the full and fascinating tale of this case, pick up a copy of A Taste For Treason by Andrew Jeffrey, available at good book shops everywhere. Join us next time for another thrilling encounter with True Spies.