Remembering Jessie Jordan, the Dundee hairdresser who ran a German spy ring from her salon

She became a spy for the Germans, she said, in the hope for some excitement in her life with her Dundee hairdressing salon to becoming an operational centre for transatlantic espionage.

Jessie Jordan, the hairdresser who was recruited as a German spy and intercepted security intelligence at her Dundee salon.

Jessie Jordan’s double life as a spy was exposed after her landlord found a map of Scotland’s military barracks in her handbag, with the hair stylist in the pay of German intelligence organisation Abwehr arrested on March 2, 1938.

Jordan was sentenced to four years in jail after admitting to sharing secrets of Scotland’s coastal defences with the German intelligence services.

At her trial in New York, the court heard the Fife depot was of first-class national importance to the defence services with the sketch of ‘very great value to the pilot of enemy bombing plane seeking out his objective,’ a report of the court proceedings said.

She met her first husband, Frederick Jordan, from Hamburg, while he worked as a waiter in Dundee. After

marrying in 1912, she moved to Germany.

She was hired by Abwehr just before returning to Scotland in 1937. On her appointment, she wrote: “I was now approaching the most dangerous and exciting period of my life. I was about to become a spy in the interests of Germany. I did not take this step because I bore Britain any ill-will or had become pro-German. Nothing could be further from the truth. I only did it to oblige friends in Germany and because I felt it would afford some excitement ...”

According to author Tim Tate in Hitler’s British Traitors, Jordan told immigration officials that she returned to Scotland to track down details of her birth father given she needed an Ahnenpass, a certificate based on church records that demonstrated her family line contained no Jewish heritage.

“It was a plausible story, but completely untrue,” said Tate, who added that Jordan had spent her last week in Germany being briefed by her Abwehr handler.

At her trial, the extent of German intelligence gathering in the United States ahead of the outbreak of World War Two emerged. Jordan sold military information to Nazi German for two years and was the central figure in a major espionage ring stretching throughout Europe to New York and Washington.

Letters from operatives were received at the hairdressing salon in Dundee’s Kinloch Street, which she set up after returning to Scotland. Former salon owners Mary and John Curran became suspicious of her activities given Jordan was “unusually keen” to secure the shop, offering double the market value despite its downmarket address.

Tate added: “The Currans surreptitiously searched Jordan’s handbag: inside they found a map of Scotland on which the location of military barracks had been marked in pencil. They showed it to the police before slipping it back in place.”

At the Dundee salon, letters postmarked New York were discovered, some which contained requests for spy equipment,blank American passports and cash. All were to be routed via the Dundee hairdresser.

After her arrest, she was sent to Saughton Prison but transferred to Aberdeen at the outbreak of World War Two.

She was described as a “model prisoner” who busied herself with needlework. Released in 1941 she was interned again for the rest of the war before being deported. She died in Hamburg in 1954.