On Wednesday, March 2, 1938 as the Nazi were edging closer to the Austrian border, Jessie Jordan was completely unaware M15 officers were circling the outside of her hair salon.
The quiet hairdresser was the opposite of a James Bond type. Far from playing cat and mouse with the cops, the Glaswegian mother-of-two had no clue she was about to be arrested, accused of acting as a German go-between.
The 50-year-old hairstylist was known to the authorities as the most hapless of Hitler’s spies, caught out by a nosey employee who saw her boss stuffing Nazi documents into her purse months before the war had even begun.
Prior her arrest in March 1938, Jessie had grown up in Glasgow before she ran away as a teen and met a German waiter called Frederick Jordan. The pair moved to Hamburg in 1907 and married 1912, making Jessie a German citizen.
By 1937 she had returned to live in Scotland - having been widowed by her first husband and divorced by her second -and she later told the Glasgow Police Alien Registration Department that she came back to reconnect with her family and to find proof of her children’s aryan descent.
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During a trip back to Germany that same year, Jessie was detained by the Gestapo who threatened to make life difficult for her daughter, an opera singer, if she did not cooperate with them.
Jessie then settled in Dundee and opened her own salon - presumably with the money she earned supplying information to Abweh, the German military-intelligence service.
They tasked her with making sketches of sensitive military installations in Scotland and operating a mailbox for German spies from her salon.
German agents already established the states would send parcels and letters to the business, and Jessie would forward them onto agents in Amsterdam which would then be passed on to Abwehr headquarters
But far from becoming a dangerous adversary, the hairdresser’s career as a spy was cut short when a sneaky salon assistant she employed started to get suspicious.
Described by police as a “busybody”, hairdressing assistant Mary Curran called the cops after she uncovered a secret map of the UK’s east coast defences stashed inside her boss’s handbag.
Although MI5 were already surveilling Jessie, they were unaware of that her Dundee shop was acting as an undercover Nazi post office.
After Mary raised the alarm, the address of the salon on Kinloch Street was added to an ongoing mail watch, after which point incriminating post from the United States was discovered.
Jessie was cuffed by MI5 agents 84 years ago and her arrest ultimately led to the discovery of a pre-war German spy ring in the United States.
Exactly why the Glasgow-born hairdresser chose to work with the Nazis is an enduring mystery of the Second World War.
The Dundee Courier reported during her trial that "it does not appear that Mrs Jordan took to spying because of love of Germany or hatred of Britain, or even from a desire to make money from it. She has apparently been chosen as an instrument by agents aware of her personal history, and in a position to put her under some sort of pressure to do what was required of her."
But the Nazis’ hopes of securing intel from a Scottish spy ahead of the war were snipped, not by Britain’s intelligence capabilities, but by hairstylist Jessie’s own stupidity.
Following her conviction, Jessie was initially sent to Saughton Prison in Edinburgh but she soon fell ill and underwent an invasive operation that included a subtotal hysterectomy.
Despite her medical troubles, her Dundee solicitor J. R. Bond described her as "a model prisoner, who showed off her needlework and exhibited no interest in an appeal."
She was moved to Aberdeen Prison when the Second World War started, where she remained until her early release in 1941.
Jessie was immediately deported as an enemy agent back to Germany and ordered never to return. She died in Hamburg in 1954.
