Spy In The Ointment Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 22 - Spy In The Ointment
MICHAEL PARK: It is 1912 and wedding bells are ringing in a little church in the beautiful German city of Hamburg.
A young waiter, Frederick Jordan, steps out into the afternoon sun with his new bride, their whole lives ahead of them. They’ve just come back to Germany after Frederick spent a few years working as a waiter in Perth, where he met the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
His wife is beaming with pride as Frederick’s family, and even a few of hers who have made the trip over congratulate the wee 25 year old, the daughter of a maid from Lanark.
This is a true love story... and nothing can stand in the way of true love.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is 1918, and Jessie Jordan sits in the parlour of her modest home in the beautiful city where she has made her home and opens a letter. Her children, Werner and Marga, run around between rooms.
Like most people in Germany Jessie has known the end of the Great War is coming for a while. Food has become more scarce, there are long queues for everyday items and there’s more than a whiff of defeat in the air.
In a way, it doesn’t bother her. She’s never felt entirely British, never entirely German either although she runs her little hairdressers, and serves her clients in fluent German, with a wee tinge of Lanarkshire to it.
The letter looks official - it could be notification of Frederick’s discharge. He had been fighting on the Western Front for four years. Her hands tremble as she opens it.
She has forgiven Frederick for spending nights on the front writing to another woman - one of many betrayals she would feel in her life. She just wants him to come home.
But somewhere deep inside her, she knows her Frederick is never coming home.
Jessie is heartbroken and after the war finally ends just months later, ends up taking her children back to Scotland for a short time, but quickly returned home to Hamburg.
Once she was home she found herself marrying Frederick’s cousin, Baum Baumgarten.
They weren’t happy.
They stuck together until 1937, Jessie running her little hairdressers which served mostly Jewish clientele. In 1925 there had been 25,000 jewish people living in the city. That seemed to be dwindling all the time.
She wasn’t blind to the reasons. You could see it on the streets, on every corner there hung a flag a vivid scarlet - like blood - with a white circle and this strange, ominous black symbol suspended in the middle like a cross from another world.
Nazi rule hadn’t exactly done Jessie’s business any favours but neither was she struggling too much in the early days of the new regime. But by 1937 all that has changed. Many of her customers were leaving Germany and many found their civil liberties so curtailed that the idea of popping down to Jessie’s salon for a shampoo and set wasn’t top of their priorities list.
And so Jessie Jordan, divorced and suddenly needing to prove that her daughter Marga, who was now a noted actor and singer in Hamburg, had a completely Aryan bloodline, returned to Scotland.
In order for Marga to go back to work as an actor, she said, she needed to prove to the Nazi regime that there was no Jewish blood in her. It didn’t help her that Jordan had certain connotations of Judaism in Nazi Germany.
MID ROLL
So I know every podcast you listen to is probably saying this at the moment but because people are commuting less, less people are downloading podcasts.
It’s not a huge downturn but it’s enough when you’re trying to build up your audience so if you enjoy Scotland, I’d really appreciate it if you’d recommend it to a couple of friends. Either on social media or by shouting it at a close friend from a safe distance away.
We really do appreciate it. Back to the show...
It is 1937 and Jessie is still in Scotland. She has spent her savings refurbishing a little salon on Kinloch Street in Dundee and is living a fairly unremarkable life as a somewhat odd outlier in one of Scotland’s big towns.
Jessie barely speaks fluent English anymore and although she sounded like the most Scottish person in the world to her German clients, she sounds like a native of Hamburg to her Scottish customers.
Still, she goes about her day and it seems to be the same thing every day. She wakes up in the morning, has breakfast, goes into the shop, she has a cup of coffee, the postman arrives with a parcel or two, she cuts some hair, she natters as best she can with her customers, she goes home, she eats dinner, she goes to bed.
And the next day is the same, up, breakfast, coffee, parcels, hair, natter, dinner, bed.
Some weekends she might go for a walk in the country or by the seaside always with a wee map and her notebook in hand. On big holidays she might go as far as Northern England on the train or the bus with her wee camera. One time she even went as far as Southampton to enjoy the English seaside.
And then it was back to the grind. Every day. Up, coffee, parcels, hair, bed. Up, coffee, parcels, hair, bed.
Jessie Jordan is living the most unremarkable of lives, cutting hair in her wee shop in Dundee that she paid way… way over the odds for. She’s living the perfect life for someone that has something to hide.
Jessie Jordan is a German spy.
The parcels and letters which arrive every day, like clockwork, at the little hairdressers in Dundee are postmarked for places like New York, San Francisco… Washington DC.
They contain requests for equipment, thousands of dollars in cash, blank American passports, coded transmissions, updates on missions. In one case, one of the dispatches sent on contained a plan to murder a high ranking US official.
Jessie Jordan would take the parcels from her shop and forward them onto Amsterdam where they would then be sent to the headquarters of the Abwehr, a branch of German Intelligence.
She had been briefed for weeks before her return to the UK by her handlers and Jessie’s wee hairdressers was the central hub of an espionage ring that kept the Nazis informed about what was going on in the US military.
The stories in the press alternated between a tale of two vigilant parties. One was a postman who became suspicious of the postmarks on the letters and packages arriving at the shop.
The other is of Jessie’s cleaner, Mary Curran, who had a shufty in Jessie’s handbag and found a maps of Scotland and Northern England with military installations marked on in pencil and annotations about size and strength.
The truth was a little more complicated than that.
MI5 and MI6 knew all about Jessie Jordan and her postbox operation. They knew that she was taking trips all over the country with her notebook and camera. They were watching her.
They had been watching her since she was recruited in Hamburg.
In New York City the FBI were desperately trying to track down a German agent known only as Crown. Until a letter came through a little hairdressers in Dundee.
Signed by the mysterious operative, the letter gave details about luring a US Army colonel to the McAlpin hotel in New York for a staff meeting. The Colonel would be stripped of the top secret documents giving a run down of the US East Coast defences and left in whatever state he happened to be in once they’d applied enough physical force.
They’d then pin the whole thing on the Communists.
MI5 intercepted the letter, as they did most of the letters and packages that came through Jessie Jordan’s post box, and decided that the time was right to tip off the Americans.
Then, just a couple of weeks later, a man posing as the US Secretary of State requested that 35 blank passports be delivered to the McAlpin hotel. The New York police arrested Guenther Rumrich, a US Army deserter and son of the secretary to imperial Austrian consulate from before the war.
It took a while before the link between the plot on the Colonel’s life and the passports began to dawn on them though.
Guenther Rumrich was Crown.
And it was MI5’s surveillance of a little hairdresser’s in Dundee that had given them the evidence they needed to prove it. Rumrich then rolled over on 18 fellow German spies operating in the USA.
All the while, MI5 were reluctant to give the game away. They didn’t want anyone to know they had been watching Jessie Jordan all along. The vigilant postie and the nosey cleaner were fantastic narratives to cover up the reasons for what happened next.
MID ROLL
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Jessie Jordan was arrested in March 1938 and interrogated by MI5. Her interrogation wasn’t what you might imagine. She wasn’t kept in a dank room with a light shining into her eyes.
Instead, a handsome middle-aged Colonel with a german accent drove her around Fife, asking her about the sketches she’d made and the photographs she had taken.
Colonel Cooke found her to be what he termed a beginner. Although her role in the transatlantic espionage ring was vital, she didn’t seem too keen on covering her tracks.
She was sentenced to four years in prison in May 1939 for espionage.
NEWSPAPER: A little grey-haired beauty parlour operator was sentenced today to serve four years in Perth prison for German spy work at Scottish coastal defences.
The prisoner, Mrs Jessie Jordan, 51, had pleaded guilty to mapping a prohibited military area near the Firth of Forth and had admitted to taking money from and communicating with “foreign agents in Germany.”
Scottish-born but possessor of German citizenship through marriage, Mrs Jordan was described by her counsel as an “unwanted child” of both Britain and Germany.
MICHAEL PARK: And that was it. Jessie Jordan was no fanatical Nazi. She had very little interest in being a citizen of either nation but she found herself in a position that the Nazi government could put pressure on her to become an operative.
With a child and a grandchild in a precarious financial position, a son in training for the Wehrmacht and a dwindling business, they knew exactly where to turn the screws.
But that doesn’t fully explain Jessie’s motivation. She loved the thrill… the excitement. She had a magnetic personality and was taken with the romantic characters of the thrillers which she devoured voraciously in her off hours.
She had never felt like she belonged anywhere and this gave her a sense of importance, of mattering to someone even if she didn’t really care for their politics. She even took to her MI5 interrogator… because he made her feel like she mattered.
Another notorious spy, Kim Philby, was once quoted as saying “To betray you must first belong - and I never belonged.”
Jessie was released from prison early for good behaviour in 1941, before being immediately rearrested and jailed as an enemy alien.
She stayed locked up throughout the war before she was deported to Germany in 1945.
The Hamburg she returned to was a blasted husk of the city that she had left. The church she had married in likely blown to smithereens by Allied bombs. The life she thought she would have with Frederick lay thirty years behind her, smashed into the dust.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
We worked extensively with Professor Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones whose article about Jessie Jordan was an invaluable resource in writing this episode. Professor Jeffreys-Jones’ new book titled “Ring of Spies: How MI5 and the FBI Brought Down the Nazis in America” is out July through The History Press and we thoroughly recommend it.
Additional voices in this episode were by Chris Moriarty.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by the human enigma cipher, Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work by heading over to Facebook and searching for Mitch Bain music.
Scotland is supported by Chris Lingwood and listeners like you on Patreon. Get involved and chuck us a couple of bucks at: patreon.com/scotlandhistorypodcast
You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co and on twitter, facebook and instagram by searching Scotland - Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.
MICHAEL PARK: