A Taste for Treason, Part 1: P.O. Box 629

True Spies Episode 169 - A Taste for Treason, Part 1: P.O. Box 629

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: And a few days later she was cleaning under the shop counter in the hairdressing salon. She was cleaning under there and she found a scrap of paper. And on this scrap of paper was one word: ‘Zeppelin’.

NARRATOR: A Taste for Treason, Part 1: PO BOX 629. Welcome to London, at the dawn of the 1930s. A little under a decade from now, German bombs will reduce much of the city to rubble. Its citizens will huddle behind blackout curtains, beneath makeshift shelters, and deep within the rattling bowels of the London Underground. A lot can change in 10 years. But on September 30, 1931, Londoners are gawking upward at another airborne interloper. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Christopher Draper, also known incidentally as The Mad Major, was a World War One flying ace who had served in the British Royal Naval Air Service.

NARRATOR: Former airman Christopher Draper is a jobbing actor and occasional daredevil. Dismayed by the treatment of veterans during the Great Depression, and looking to boost his own profile, he’s about to pull off an eye-catching stunt over Britain’s capital. In the cockpit of his De Havilland Puss Moth monoplane, the pilot zeroes in on his target. As jaws drop on the ground below, Draper brings the nose of the Puss Moth down.

ANDREW JEFFREY: He flew through Tower Bridge, famously. 

NARRATOR: In a flash, the monoplane buzzes between the Gothic towers of the Bridge, before coursing upriver to repeat the feat at Westminster. Now, Christopher Draper’s name is on everybody’s lips. But The Mad Major’s newfound notoriety attracts the wrong kind of admirer.

ANDREW JEFFREY: This brought him to the attention of one Lord Sempill. Sempill was himself something of a pilot, he was an airman. He was also somewhat crazy, it has to be said. And he was a great supporter of fascism.

NARRATOR: Draper’s association with Lord Sempill would prove to be the first link in an improbable chain of events. A winding road of espionage, dumb luck, and detective brilliance that would lead to the discovery of an international network of Nazi spies, operating on both sides of the Atlantic. This two-part story will take you from the cockpit of The Mad Major’s Puss Moth to the factories of New York, to the stylist’s chair of a Scottish hairdresser, and the creaking cabins of the French Navy. You’ll discover the secret machinations that paved the road to war.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Once the Nazis were in power all the gloves were off. 

NARRATOR: You’ll meet the agents, double agents, and spymasters that battled in the shadows for the soul of the Western World. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: On one occasion at Madison Square Garden, he called for three Heil Hitlers and then three Heil President Roosevelts. 

NARRATOR: And you’ll understand the power of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Mary was suspicious of Jessie from the very outset.

NARRATOR: Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin. Meet your guide for these episodes of True Spies. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: My name is Andrew Jeffrey. I'm an author, an historian specializing in intelligence history during the Nazi era.

NARRATOR: Andrew Jeffrey lives in Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. Strange as it may sound, the intercontinental sprawl of this story began as an intriguing nugget of local history.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Well, way back in about the 1980s, I became aware of the existence of a German spy in Dundee. And in fact, I managed to speak to some of the people who were directly involved in the case at the time. But it was very obvious that there was a lot more to this than met the eye as a local history exercise, if you like. 

NARRATOR: In recent years, Andrew has come into possession of a treasure trove of declassified documents from the FBI and MI5 archives.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And it meant that now we're able to piece the whole story together, all of the various strands of it. 

NARRATOR: It all begins with a letter.

ANDREW JEFFREY: That letter, the intelligence within it, was passed to the Americans. It then led from that to the rounding up of a ring of Nazi spies in New York. And it also led to the apprehension of another German spy, this time in Prague, in Czechoslovakia. And from that German spy, it led on to yet another one, and arguably by far the most damaging of the lot, an agent codenamed Charles. This officer threatened the security of the Marine Nationale and the Royal Navy.

NARRATOR: So where does our Mad Major, Christopher Draper, come into play? We left Draper at the start of his relationship with William Forbes-Sempill, the Lord of Craigievar Castle. A committed fascist who would one day be unmasked as a spy for Imperial Japan, Lord Sempill was also a fellow airman and highly decorated. He had an enticing offer for our penniless pilot/actor.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Sempill was setting up something called the Aces of the Air Tour, and this was to go around the cinemas in the UK advertising air-mindedness. 

NARRATOR: In the 1930s, aviation was a relatively new field. ‘Air-mindedness’ - a fascination with the possibilities of this gravity-defying tech - was all the rage. Lord Sempill invited Christopher Draper to join his Aces of the Air tour, in which British and German pilots alike would regale UK audiences with grand ideas about peace and the future of flight. Draper happily accepted Sempill’s proposition. It just so happened that one of Draper’s fellow Aces of the Air was a German called Eduard Ritter von Schleich, who would later serve as an Air Force commander under the Nazis.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Draper struck up a friendship with von Schleich. The two were invited to Germany and the two of them met Hitler.

NARRATOR: At first, Draper was enamored with Eduard von Schleich and with the Nazis. He agreed to advocate for Hitler in London and began arranging a series of talks in support of the burgeoning Nazi Party. But like all out-of-work actors, money was always on Draper’s mind. Before long, he decided that his efforts could no longer go unrewarded. He asked a German contact in London if he might be able to aid the Reich more meaningfully - in return for a modest handful of Reichsmarks, of course. In 1933, the Germans came through. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: He's invited to go to Hamburg to meet German intelligence officers. He's put up in a hotel overnight. He's taken the following morning by a really circuitous route, which involves going around several blocks more than once, and ends up in a cafe where, by his own account, he met this bizarre character sitting on the other side of the table.

NARRATOR: According to Draper - who did have a flair for the dramatic - the man at the cafe cut an intriguing figure.

ANDREW JEFFREY: This man wore dark glasses, a hat, and a trench coat, like something straight out of the extras list for The Third Man. He didn't get up to shake Draper's hand, incidentally, which might have given the game away because he had a wooden leg. 

NARRATOR: If the mysterious German was already known to the Allies, a wooden leg would have narrowed down the options on an ID parade.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Anyway, Draper was recruited by this man to become an Abwehr agent. 

NARRATOR: We’ve encountered the Abwehr - German military intelligence - on True Spies before. Prior to the Second World War, they were the main player in Germany’s small intelligence community but Draper’s time as a German spy would prove to be short-lived.

ANDREW JEFFREY: He took cold feet and then reported the approach to the British authorities and was interviewed by MI5.

NARRATOR: Perhaps Christopher Draper realized he was in over his head. He might have been The Mad Major but he wasn’t entirely stupid. MI5 agreed to run Draper as a double agent against the Abwehr, feeding the Germans inconsequential drips of intelligence in the hope of learning more about their way of doing things. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Critically, Draper was given a series of addresses to send intelligence to in Germany. One of those was P.O. Box 629, Hamburg, a Herr L. Sanders at P.O. Box 629 Hamburg. 

NARRATOR: In time, that address would prove to be the kernel of an explosive international investigation. But before we get there, it’s important to understand exactly what flight technology meant to Nazi Germany.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Well, Germany had been fairly comprehensively disarmed in the years after the First World War, a part of the peace settlement. It was only partially successful. I mean, whole train-loads of weaponry disappeared into the vast German rail network.

NARRATOR: Germany, which felt hard-done-by by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, did not intend to honor the agreement it had signed after WW1.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And companies like Fokker, who had been building warplanes for the World War One German Air Force, simply moved production over the border - in Fokker’s case, into Holland. They were still supplying the Germans with aircraft.

NARRATOR: This secretive arms industry wasn’t limited to Western Europe. Between the wars, the Germans found an unlikely ally in the USSR.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They signed secret military codicils to treaties with Russia that allowed them to rearm in secret using Russian airfields, in particular one at Lipetsk, south of Moscow. Hilariously, it was a very bleak place. And there was a sign over the door of the guardhouse at the Lipetsk airfield in Russia. In English, it read “Welcome to the arsehole of the world.” 

NARRATOR: When Hitler came to power in 1933, he quickly decided that his Third Reich would no longer suffer such indignities. The gloves were off.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Germany began openly expanding its military air capability. Military aviation was the technology that was clearly - much as drone technology is today - going to be a war-winning weapon in any coming war. 

NARRATOR: Understandably, a resurgent, expansionist Germany was a daunting prospect for its neighbors.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Polish intelligence managed to get their hands on a German military aircraft production plan, which was really more of a wish list, but it was nevertheless a plan to build the world's largest Air Force in a very, very short order. 

NARRATOR: According to the Poles, Germany was planning to amass 500 modern combat aircraft by October 1935, and more than 10,000 by the end of 1938. Polish intelligence passed this alarming news on to their counterparts in London and Paris.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And all three nations started aviation rearming, rapidly re-arming in the air. 

NARRATOR: And just like that, a new arms race had its starting pistol. Aviation was about to enter a new era of research and innovation. If war broke out, nobody wanted to be left on the back foot.

ANDREW JEFFREY: That's why Abwehr started sending spies out to the US and to the British. You also need to know what your potential enemies and your potential friends are up to.

NARRATOR: Britain and the US played host to the world’s most advanced aviation industries. The Abwehr deployed agents to both countries with the aim of stealing their secrets. The Mad Major, Christopher Draper, was probably intended to be one such agent. Another was Wilhelm Lonkowski.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Wilhelm Lonkowski landed in New York in January 1935 tasked with spying on American aviation, particularly American military aviation. And his modus operandi was to go out and recruit ethnic Germans working in American aircraft factories. 

NARRATOR: The United States had a large ethnic German population, some of whom had emigrated in the wake of the economic devastation of the 1920s.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Very much embittered with what happened to them, they left Germany and congregated in certain areas in the US, one of which was the Upper East Side in New York where there was a large German community. There were marches in the street with Nazi flags. 

NARRATOR: Nazi sympathizers made up a small but vocal minority of German emigres. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Most German Americans wanted nothing to do with these people and their appalling regime. 

NARRATOR: But the Abwehr knew that it only took a few sympathetic Germans in the right place to deliver the intelligence they craved. In 1935, Wilhelm Lonkowski set out to find them. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: He did manage to recruit, for example, one man called Otto Voss, who was a draftsman in an aircraft factory on Long Island. Others he did try to recruit included Werner Gudenberg, who was also a foreman at the Curtiss Wright plant in Buffalo. 

NARRATOR: But, like Christopher Draper, Wilhelm Lonkowski was not much of an agent. Unlike Draper, Lonkowski didn’t go running to the authorities in the hope of a payday. His weakness wasn’t money.

ANDREW JEFFREY: He was, unfortunately, a drunk, as was his wife, who accompanied him to the US. So much so that, what his wife did on one occasion was, during a very drunken evening, confess to their landlady, their Long Island landlady, that no, Wilhelm was not the piano tuner he was claiming to be. He was actually working for the German government. A gross breach of basic security, of course, while under the influence of a great deal of alcohol.

NARRATOR: If ever you needed a reminder that James Bond is pure fiction, it’s this: heavy drinkers do not make good spies. However, Lonkowski wasn’t entirely useless. One of his sub-agents, Werner Gudenberg, provided drawings of an aircraft being developed for the US Navy by Curtiss Wright, America’s largest aviation firm. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Pretty basic stuff.

NARRATOR: These drawings weren’t going to set the world ablaze. But, eager to show his German handlers that he wasn’t just drinking on company time, Lonkowski arranged to pass the material on - which is where Karl Schluter comes in.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Karl Schluter was an interesting character. He was, on the face of it, a steward on the German transatlantic liner Europa. But he had a double role. He was also a courier for Abwehr. He was [in] contact with agents in the US like Wilhelm Lonkowski and was bringing any intelligence they were able to get back to Germany.

NARRATOR: Friday, September, 27, 1935. It’s late in the evening and Wilhelm Lonkowski stalks through Manhattan. In his right hand swings a violin case - a suitably noir-ish accoutrement for the task at hand. But there’ll be no music tonight. Inside the case is a small bundle of photographic negatives - images of the Curtiss-Wright drawings supplied by Werner Gudenberg. But as he makes his rendezvous at the docks he attracts some unwelcome attention.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And he was in the process of handing these over to Karl Schluter, the courier on the German liner Europa, when he was spotted by a customs officer named John Roberts.

NARRATOR: Schluter knows the game is up. He slips back aboard the Europa leaving Lonkowski - and the violin case - to their fates. Customs officer John Roberts suspects that Lonkowski is carrying drugs. He arrests the German on the spot.

ANDREW JEFFREY: When he opened the violin case, all he could see was seven photographic negatives. This was very odd. He couldn't understand what was going on here. Roberts was not an intelligence officer, but a customs officer so he can't be blamed for not understanding what was going on.

NARRATOR: At this stage, America’s ‘spy-mindedness’ in regard to Germany was somewhat lacking. In the public imagination, the more immediate threat lay across the Pacific, in Imperial Japan. So what John Roberts did next shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

ANDREW JEFFREY: He decided the best thing he could do - as it was a weekend - he would release Mr. Lonkowski on a promise that he came back on Monday for questioning. 

NARRATOR: A more innocent time, perhaps.

ANDREW JEFFREY: A very grateful Lonkowski immediately hot-footed it straight up through New York to the surgery of Dr. Ignatz Griebl, Nazi sympathizer and sub-agent of Lonkowski.

NARRATOR: Dr. Ignatz Griebl arrived in New York in 1928. Remember that vocal minority of embittered German Americans?

ANDREW JEFFREY: Griebl was an out-and-out Nazi, a vicious anti-Semite, a vile racist, and strangely enough, a surgeon in Harlem, in New York, where he was an obstetrician, in fact. He also ran a medical practice in the Upper East Side in Manhattan. 

NARRATOR: Outside of his day job, Griebl was a propagandist for the Nazis in America. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: For example, he was famous for addressing meetings, on one occasion at Madison Square Garden, where he bizarrely, at the end of his speech - called for three Heil Hitlers and then three Heil President Roosevelts. He was blissfully forgetting his oath that he had taken on taking American citizenship to disregard any loyalty to any other nationality but American. 

NARRATOR: Griebl, Lonkowksi knew, would be able to get him out of the country before anyone with the faintest idea of what they were looking at laid eyes on the negatives. En route to the doctor’s house, Lonkowski collected his wife, Augusta. Their life in New York was over.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Griebl, recognizing the urgency of the situation, got Lonkowski into his car and drove him to the Griebl country cottage in Putnam County and told him to hole up there until Griebel could make arrangements to exfiltrate him out of the US. So both the Lonkowskis were in this cottage, barely willing to turn on even a light at night, until another Griebel associate came up in Griebl's car and drove them through the night over the Canadian border.

NARRATOR: From Canada, the loose-lipped Lonkowskis were spirited back to Germany. Wilhelm’s short and inglorious career as an Abwehr spy had come to an end - and so has his involvement in our story. But other characters in this somewhat fruitless escapade - like the courier Karl Schluter and the vicious Dr. Griebl - will grace our stage again. So, as the Lonkowskis steam across the Atlantic, we’ll head in the same direction. First stop: Dundee.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Dundee is a port town on the River Tay on the east coast of Scotland. For many years it was part of the trading network across the North Sea to the Baltic ports and so on Dundee started importing raw jute from the Indian subcontinent and a vast industry was built on the basis of that. And the city mushroomed and doubled in population in no time at all. It was very overcrowded. Public health was a major concern in Dundee. Infant mortality was the highest, for example, in Scotland. It was a pretty grim place of mean streets, smoking mill chimneys, and a pervasive smell of raw jute. This was the city that Jessie Jordan found herself in 1937. 

NARRATOR: Jessie Jordan - a strong name. And it’s a good job too - you’ll be hearing it a lot from here on out.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Jessie Jordan was the illegitimate daughter of a Scottish housemaid. 

NARRATOR: Jessie was born Jessie Wallace in 1887. A working-class native of Glasgow, another industrial behemoth in the Scottish Lowlands, she had a tough start in life. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: She had a very insecure and very disorganized upbringing, certainly very little love for her from her mother, who went on to have another 14 children by different men.

NARRATOR: As an adult, Jessie became a housemaid. It was during a stint at the Royal Hotel in Dundee, at the age of 20, that she would meet the man who would alter the course of her life.

ANDREW JEFFREY: She happened to meet a German waiter. The waiter was standing reading a telegram and he was clearly very distressed.

NARRATOR: The waiter had very little English but he knew enough to understand that the telegram bore very bad news. Taking pity on the young man, Jessie offered to translate.

ANDREW JEFFREY: The telegram told the waiter that his brother had been killed in a building collapse in London.

NARRATOR: The name of this bereaved waiter?

ANDREW JEFFREY: His name was Fritz Jordan, and he didn't know how to get to London. So Jesse then took him down to the railway station and put him on the right train for London. 

NARRATOR: Despite the tragic circumstance of their meeting, the pair exchanged addresses. Soon after, romance blossomed. Eventually, the two married, and together they moved to Hamburg, Germany.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They were married, not very long, and a daughter was born when the world went mad and World War I broke out. Jesse's husband, Fritz Jordan, was called up for military service. So Jesse was now a serviceman's wife, but still a foreign national, an enemy national, living in Hamburg in a global war. She was a Brit. She was living in Germany during the First World War. She had a lot of difficulties and was suspected, ironically, given what was to come, of being a British spy. 

NARRATOR: Fritz survived the trenches, but succumbed to the Spanish Flu epidemic that swept the globe at the end of the 1910s. Now a widow, Jessie attempted to start again in the UK. But after such a long time away, it no longer felt like home. She returned to Hamburg, where she established three successful hairdressing salons in fashionable parts of the city. It had been a rocky road, but the girl from Glasgow had made it.

ANDREW JEFFREY: But the arrival of the Nazis on the scene changed everything.

NARRATOR: Many of Jesse’s clients had been Jewish women. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Who, for various reasons, began to disappear after the Nazi accession to power.

NARRATOR: Before long, Jessie herself ran afoul of the Nazi regime.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Because she was illegitimate, she could not prove that she was of Aryan descent. So not only could she not work, but her daughter Marga, who had grown up [by] this time to be a very talented teenage singer and actress, could not work either because they could not meet the Nazi's racial purity laws.

NARRATOR: In order to preserve what remained of her and her daughters’ lives in Germany, Jessie knew what she had to do - return to Scotland. Trace her biological father. Prove her Aryan descent.

ANDREW JEFFREY: This got to the ears of a friend of hers, an acquaintance more than a friend, who had been a customer in the hairdresser's shop, who was the wife of an officer in Abwehr. She told her husband. Her husband then realized that Jessie potentially had value as an agent. She was a Brit who could pass as a Brit in Britain. 

NARRATOR: Now in her 50s, Jessie had spent most of her adult life in Germany. She might have been Scottish-born, but the Abwehr determined that her loyalty belonged to the Reich. If they could give her what she wanted, she might prove a worthy asset. In Hamburg, these decisions were made by a man named Hilmar Dierks - a veteran of Germany’s World War I military intelligence service. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: And Dierks arranged for Jessie to be intercepted on her way to catch the boat to Scotland and then recruited her as an agent.

NARRATOR: Jessie Jordan was happy to oblige the Abwehr.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Why Jessie agreed to do this is unclear. She claimed it was down to boredom. She had a very low boredom threshold, she claimed.

NARRATOR: There might have been more to it than that. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: Jessie, if she was not a particularly accomplished spy, she certainly was an accomplished liar. 

NARRATOR: Jessie’s daughter, Marga, had a daughter of her own. Could the Abwehr have made promises regarding her future to sweeten the deal for a doting grandmother? We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that on that day in February 1937 Jessie missed her boat. She spent the next 12 days receiving some basic espionage training.

ANDREW JEFFREY: It was no training at all really for any sort of agent, but that's all the training she got.

NARRATOR: Nonetheless, when she eventually landed at Leith, Scotland, she was a fully-fledged agent of the German Abwehr. But first - some personal business. The search for the absentee father who would legitimize her in the eyes of the Nazi state.

ANDREW JEFFREY: By the late summer of ‘37, it was apparent to Jessie that she could not trace her natural father, who had made sure that he would not be found. There is evidence that he'd actually emigrated to Canada by that time and changed his name.

NARRATOR: Evidently, this particular mission was doomed to failure. So Jessie turned to Plan B.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Plan B was to stay in the UK, bring Marga and the granddaughter over to the UK, and open a hairdressing business somewhere in the UK. 

NARRATOR: By remaining in the UK, Jessie could do what she loved, keep her daughter and granddaughter safe, and stay in the Abwehr’s good books by passing local intel back to Germany. To establish a new business on this side of the North Sea, she needed money - and fast. But at the time, the Nazis made it nigh-on impossible to move her money out of Germany.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Fortunately, Jessie had a rich aunt in Wales, so she traveled down to Wales to see this rich aunt, arranged a loan from her, and then continued on to the south coast. 

NARRATOR: Access to money? Check. But before she could settle in the UK, she needed to prove to her German handlers that their faith in her was not misplaced. The South Coast of England is home to a number of British military installations. It was here, in 1937, that Jessie Jordan made her first attempts at spycraft.

ANDREW JEFFREY: She went first to Southampton, where she photographed Southampton docks and bought picture postcards and so on of the area. She then went to the garrison town of Aldershot, and she was to be seen going up and down Queens Avenue, Queens Parade as it’s sometimes known, in Aldershot through all the barrack blocks, pacing out the buildings, counting the floors, and counting the windows. She also had in her hand postcards of Aldershot and was marking prominent buildings on them. Four copies of these postcards survive in the MI5 archive, and she has, for example, marked a church spire ‘kirker’ as in ‘church’ in German. She'd marked ‘kirker’ as if of course, the person picking up the card wouldn't recognize the church spire when they saw it. It was very amateurish stuff. 

NARRATOR: Of course, if Jessie had thought to peruse some of the local shops, she would have found ordnance survey maps of these very areas available for a pittance over the counter.

ANDREW JEFFREY: In other words, it was useless information, completely useless information. However, she passed it up into an envelope, postcard sketches, and notes and sent it off to the address that she had been given in Hamburg. That was Herr L. Sanders, P.O. Box 629 Hamburg.

NARRATOR: You might recall the name Herr L. Sanders, owner of P.O. Box 629 in Hamburg. The address she was given was the same one that had been supplied to Christopher Draper - by now a double agent for MI5. In reality, Herr L. Sanders was the alias of Hilmar Dierks, Abwehr spymaster. The unwitting Dierks had re-activated Draper in 1936 - a year before Jessie Jordan’s adventure began. Thanks to The Mad Major, the British had placed an intercept on the Hamburg address. Now, thanks to Jessie, it was about to bear fruit.

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

NARRATOR: Jessie’s amateurish dossier from her excursions by the coast fell neatly into the hands of British counterintelligence. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: The one thing they didn't reveal was the name and address of the sender of that information. They didn't reveal Jessie's identity. 

NARRATOR: That revelation came a few weeks later when another envelope was intercepted on its way to Hamburg. This time, Jessie had used a second-hand envelope, originally sent to her at her brother’s address in Perth, Scotland.

ANDREW JEFFREY: It's not exactly high-class tradecraft. These are really basic, fundamental errors of tradecraft. However, that's what she did. And the result was that MI5 got a line on Jessie Jordan very quickly after she arrived in the UK and knew that she had sent this intelligence from Aldershot.

NARRATOR: MI5 didn’t move in on Jessie immediately. As a spy of limited means and dubious talents, they thought it best to keep tabs on her Perth address and watch to see if anything more interesting came of it. They wouldn’t have too long to wait. Jessie was about to begin the next chapter of her short career in espionage.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Jessie was living with this half-brother of hers in Perth at this time, in the middle of 1937. She was in the habit of taking her brother's children to the seaside at a place called Broughty Ferry, which is just outside Dundee. And one day she was reading The Courier, which is the local newspaper in Dundee, sitting on the beach at Broughty Ferry, and she happened to spot an advert for a hairdressing business for sale in the city. Having got that loan from her aunt in Wales, she decided this might be the very one that would allow her to start a business.

NARRATOR: Following her nose, Jessie answered the advert. She was directed to call on the Curran family, who lived in a tenement building in Dundee, and make her inquiries about the business there. Three days later, on July 30, 1937, Jessie Jordan came knocking on the door of Mary Curran. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: And it was she, it was Mary who opened the door in the tenement flat to find this immaculately dressed, very sophisticated-looking woman standing on the tenement staircase asking about the hairdressing business. 

NARRATOR: Mary’s brother-in-law owned the hairdressers, where she also worked. This was her turf and this glamorous interloper with the Germanic edge to her voice… Well, she didn’t belong.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Mary was suspicious from the very start. There was something that just didn't add up. What was this woman from Hamburg, who had run successful businesses there, inquiring about a very downmarket hairdressing business in a very working-class poor area of Dundee? Mary couldn't figure this one out. 

NARRATOR: Even so, Mary couldn’t stand in the way of the sale and she’d still have a job at the salon to go to. Jessie Jordan acquired the business for the less-than-princely sum of £70 ($90). Soon, she set to work bringing the salon in line with her upmarket image.

ANDREW JEFFREY: Jessie was making all these trips to Germany and bringing back very expensive top-grade hairdressing equipment, the latest machines for giving Vienna perms. If you look at a photograph of them today, they look like instruments of medieval torture, but that was hairdressing equipment back in the day. Anyway, she was bringing all this very expensive equipment back from Germany and doing it on a regular basis and spending a large sum of money renovating this very downmarket hairdressing business. It seemed that Jesse was setting up a business that should be in an affluent part of the city. But she was setting it up in the working-class area of the city. It didn't add up.

NARRATOR: Where was all of Jessie’s money coming from? And why spend it in Dundee? These questions played on Mary Curran’s mind, night and day.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And then there was all the mail that started appearing at the shop, and it was coming in from across Europe. This was very strange. You know, international mail, again, was not something that people saw very often. Jesse was getting this mail and Mary could see she was getting this mail.

NARRATOR: Remember, Mary Curran works with Jessie at the salon. Nothing escapes her notice. Finally, she can no longer contain her suspicions.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And Mary told her husband, John, who was a Dundee tramway conductor, that she was convinced that Jesse must be a German spy. All this mail coming in, all this money, all these things that were happening, the very odd things that were happening in the shop, and Jesse's rather odd questions about, “Are there any military installations nearby?” 

NARRATOR: John Curran, however, was less open to the idea that something was very wrong with Jessie Jordan.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And John ridiculed her. He said, “What's there to spy on in Dundee? There are no military installations, There's no naval dockyards, no airfields, nothing. So there's nothing to spy on here. You're just being daft, woman!”

NARRATOR: But Mary would not be discouraged. She was determined to prove or disprove her theory once and for all.

ANDREW JEFFREY: And a few days later she was cleaning under the shop counter in the hairdressing salon, and she was cleaning rather more vigorously and rather more carefully than was entirely necessary, shall we say? She was cleaning under there and she found a scrap of paper. And on this scrap of paper was one word - ‘Zeppelin’ - and a series of numerals.

NARRATOR: Mary was no codebreaker. The numerals meant nothing to her but she knew code when she saw it. She also knew what ‘Zeppelin’ meant. Everybody did.

ANDREW JEFFREY: To people in Britain in the 1930s, it meant air raids because Zeppelins, airships, had raided even as far north as Edinburgh during the First World War. 

NARRATOR: Even John Curran, our arch-skeptic, remembered the looming specter of death from above. This was something that he couldn’t dismiss as fantasy.

ANDREW JEFFREY: So she arranged with her husband, John, to come down to the shop that same afternoon. And while Jesse was busy with a customer - doing a customer's hair - Mary and John stood at the counter pretending to read a book. And meanwhile, John was busily scribbling down a copy of this sheet of paper with this word, Zeppelin, and the numerals on it. And then Mary quickly surreptitiously shoved it back under the counter. 

NARRATOR: John took the copy of the mysterious note to his boss at the tramway garage. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: And his boss in the tramway garage was also just as skeptical as John and said, “Mary's been seeing too many movies.” The same sort of stuff. Still, Mary would not give up. She was made of stern stuff. And, just a week later, she found another piece of paper while she was cleaning very vigorously under the counter with, this time, a sketch map of some sort of installation.

NARRATOR: The sketch showed railway lines and industrial buildings.

ANDREW JEFFREY: This was obviously a major industrial or military site.

NARRATOR: Mary had no idea what she was looking at but she knew it could be valuable. She also knew that she wouldn’t be able to copy it - the drawing was too complex.

ANDREW JEFFREY: So she decided to do the only other thing possible. She shoved it down the front of her dress and took it home at lunchtime, handed it to her husband who ran down, caught a tram into Dundee, showed it to his boss in the tramway garage. The boss in the tramway garage took one look at this and went, “Now, maybe this is serious.” 

NARRATOR: John and his boss knew that time was not on their side. If the sketch wasn’t returned to the salon soon, Jessie Jordan would know that somebody was on to her. 

ANDREW JEFFREY: So they took it into Dundee police station and showed it to the police. The police immediately recognized that it was serious, photographed it, and handed it back to John Curran, who raced back up to the flat in Church Street where they lived and handed it back to Mary. Mary then raced back over to the shop and got it back onto the counter before Jessie noticed it was missing. 

NARRATOR: The Currans weren’t alone in their sense of urgency. The police in Dundee were not equipped for counterespionage work. They needed to get the photographed material in front of the experts.

ANDREW JEFFREY: It was handed to a senior police officer who went down on the night train to London that same night 

NARRATOR: The next morning, the policeman arrived at MI5 headquarters in London. He had an urgent appointment with Edward Hinchley Cooke - a brilliant spycatcher with a weather eye on Nazi Germany.

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

NARRATOR: Remember, MI5 knew about Jessie. Her bungled reportage from the south coast of England had placed her squarely on the security service’s radar. A mail intercept had already been placed on her half-brother’s home in Perth.

ANDREW JEFFREY: What MI5 did not know until the police officer turned up from Dundee with the sketch map of this mysterious installation, was that Jessie had opened this hairdressing salon in Dundee, and MI5 that same day put out a mail intercept on that address.

NARRATOR: Number One, Kinloch Street. To most, a swankier-than-average hairdresser. To MI5, a goldmine. In the next episode of True Spies, Jessie Jordan becomes the unwitting catalyst for an international counterintelligence operation.

ANDREW JEFFREY: One of the first things revealed by the intercept on the mail at Kinloch Street in Dundee, was a stream of letters coming from an Abwehr agent in New York who signed himself either Herr Krone, or in English, Crown.

NARRATOR: And a spy discovers the deadly cost of treachery.

ANDREW JEFFREY: They tied him to a stake in a ditch and they shot him by firing squad.

NARRATOR: I’m Sophia Di Martino. That’s next time on True Spies.