Saw this article about a local woman and thought with the connection to breaking a spy ring in the US it might be of interest to some of our board members.
Agent Hilda: The middle-aged Scottish housewife who outfoxed the Gestapo
IT IS an intriguing untold wartime story of bitterly divided loyalties, blackmail and terrifying consequences. In 1911, a young Scottish modern languages student travels to Germany, falls in love with a local man and marries him. They make their life together in Hamburg and raise a son.
By James Murray
But in 1938, her husband dies of a sudden heart attack, and the next year she returns to the UK, a middle-aged widow, to visit her elderly parents. It is the eve of the Second World War and the Gestapo, having discovered her dual-nationality, force her to spy for them by threatening her son, now a member of the Hitler Youth. Yet as soon as she returns to the UK, she goes straight to the police and is recruited as a double-agent for the British intelligence services. It might sound like a movie script, but it's all true. And author Miller Caldwell, whose great-aunt Hilda Campbell is the woman at the centre of the tale, has turned her sensational story into a novel, A Reluctant Spy.
She saved countless lives, he believes, by misleading the Gestapo with false information, and even had to fake her own death to escape being unmasked.
With all the major players in the story long dead, Miller, 69, had a tough task piecing together the details of his greataunt's wartime role.
The National Archives has no known record of Hilda or her exploits, which are unverifiable. What is beyond doubt is that Hilda Campbell, a young Scottish woman who'd just finished studying modern languages at Aberdeen University, travelled to Germany in 1911 to improve her spoken German. A keen oboist, she went to a classical music concert in Hamburg where she was swept off her feet by a local doctor, Willy Büttner Richter. Marriage followed and the newlyweds honeymooned with Hilda's parents at their home in Forres, near Elgin.
Then the pair set up home in Hamburg and Hilda settled happily into married life.
During the First World War, as an enemy alien, she was placed under house arrest and her movements restricted. Throughout those difficult years she supported her husband and they went on to have a son, Otto.
When the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s Otto was compelled to join the Hitler Youth and, like millions, was brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda machine.
Hilda's world collapsed on March 12, 1938, when her husband died suddenly from a heart attack.
As war drew near, the widowed single mother found herself torn between her love for her son and loyalty to her homeland. From his research, Miller believes a Gestapo chief, who he has named as Gerhardt Eicke, became aware of Hilda's situation and blackmailed her into working for him. When she made plans to travel by boat to Scotland to see her elderly parents, he ordered her to take note of the location of airfields and any movements of British soldiers.
Speaking from his home in Dumfries, Miller takes up the story, saying: "When Hilda arrived at Aberdeen she went straight to the police.
"She was kept overnight in Aberdeen and two MI5 agents spoke to her and told her to tell Eicke the airfields were terrible, only used for small planes and were definitely not suitable for heavy aircraft.
"When she got back to Germany, Eicke was so pleased with her information she was given an Eagle medal."
After arriving back in Germany, he says, Hilda was trained in how to transmit radio messages. Her German spymasters then posted her to Lisbon in Portugal, where she lived in a small cottage and was tasked with receiving messages from German agents working in the United States.
Miller says: "She was given the coordinates of ship convoys from people in America and she had to pass them on to Germany.
"She was told one convoy had been hit and so the next time she changed the coordinates for the convoy so that the U-boats wouldn't be able to find it and sink the ships.
"Her action saved countless lives but she knew she couldn't do it again because they would work out she was misleading them.
"While dealing with that dreadful dilemma, she decided to fake her own death. In her cottage by the beach she left soup on the stove and clothing to suggest she had gone for a swim and drowned.
"In reality she went directly to the British Embassy in Lisbon and was flown home. She was able to pass on some information about a huge spy ring in the United States which was broken up."
He believes it was the so-called Duquesne ring, the largest espionage case in US history. At least one member of it was supplying information about the movement of Allied ships.
It was only after the end of the war that Hilda was able to safely return to Hamburg to see what had come of her family. She learned her son had been shot dead by a sniper in Russia and her sister-in-law had vanished, presumed dead, in a concentration camp because she had Jewish ancestry.
In the chaos of the time she found love with a British Major, Francis Simpson. The pair had a whirlwind romance.
He was knighted and became British Ambassador to Finland, Iran and Poland. Hilda took the secrets of her life to the grave.
Robert Hutton, author of Agent Jack and an expert on British double agents, said: "If there's one thing you learn researching spy agencies, is that there's no such thing as a story too outlandish to be true. German intelligence did blackmail people to work for them, and it was bad at selecting recruits: more than one agent sent to Britain turned themselves in on arrival.
"Many MI5 files were destroyed after the war, and many others are still secret."
Miller, who met Hilda in 1954 at a family event when he was just four, learned after her death about her double agent role.
While playing Trivial Pursuits with his 90-year-old godmother, a question about Germany came up, prompting her to spill the beans on Hilda's secret. When Miller became an author in his early 50s he began years of research including interviews with his late uncle, Dr Stanley Caldwell, who knew her well.
Now French media company ARTE is planning to turn the story of Hilda's war into two one-hour documentaries secured by agent Mathilde Vuillermoz.
"I hope the documentary will lead to a Hollywood film," says Miller.
"It is one of the last truly great stories of the war which I have been privileged to write.
"To me, Hilda showed remarkable courage in what must have been a terrible time, especially as she had a son in the German army.
"She was clever and kept very cool in a dangerous world. I'm very proud of her."
Hilda may never have thought of herself as a female James Bond but that may well be her legacy now.
