Jessie Jordan, Dundee Spy

The Poor Mouth has received a number of hits from people searching for information about Jessie Jordan of Dundee. I mentioned her in passing in this previous post.

There appears to be virtually nothing about her on the internet apart from this very very brief item from the Daily Telegraph in 2000. For the benefit of other searchers I have taken this from Sean Murphy’s book “Letting the Side Down” (Sutton 2003):

Although Germany had virtually no spies operating in the UK before the start of WWII a few individuals were imprisoned for espionage during the late 1930’s.

One of these was Jessie Jordan, the Scottish widow of a German who had been killed during WWI. After the war she had stayed in Germany and had set up a hairdressing salon in Hamburg. However, business suffered after the Nazis took power (a lot of her clientele were Jewish)and in 1937 she decided to return to Scotland to act as housekeeper to her recently widowed brother.

It would appear that her plans to return came to the attention to the Abwehr who recruited her. Unfortunately for her the Abwehr agent was under surveillance by British Intelligence and she herself was monitored from the very moment she returned to the UK. In Dundee she opened a hew salon but in her spare time she would dress up as a char lady and would map coastal defences in Eastern Scotland. On other occasions she travelled to Southern England to map defences in Aldershot and Southampton. She was also acted as a post box cover for German agents in the USA. The discovery of this activity by MI5 enabled the FBI to break up a major spy ring in the USA.

Jessie Jordan was arrested and imprisoned for four years for being “in communication with foreign agents for purposes prejudicial to the purposes and interests of the State.”

Jessie
Jordan
Dundee
Spy