Some folks think that the Somerton Man being Carl Webb means all the questions have been answered.

JESSICA HARKNESS WAS A SPY !!!!

Or so said her daughter.

Now spies don’t like to use their real names, anyone who has read le Carre knows this, they use pseudonyms. Spies also tend to work in an environment that produces good information and in the doing appear to be relatively uninterested in the quality of such information as one of their skills is to be able to blend in with the ‘environment that produces good information’. Female spies have the added benefit in that they may be able to strike up a friendship with someone who can innocently assist them with ‘blending into an environment that produces good information’.

Jestyn is a pseudonym.

Many of the regular clientele of the Clifton Gardens Hotel were employed at the nearby Australian Water Transport Op-Coy (AWT) and they had an intimate knowledge of all the Australian and Allied shipping that transited in and out of Sydney Harbour, submarines included.

There’s your ‘environment that produces good information.’

Alfred Boxall was one of those employed at AWT and who regularly drank at the Clifton Gardens Hotel. He was the innocent one.

’Jestyn’, as he knew her, was known to be in his company at the hotel on a regular basis and on one of these occasions she gifted him with an inscribed copy of the Rubaiyat.

There’s your ‘friendship with someone who can assist them with blending into an environment that produces good information.’

The gift.

Jessica Harkness was a SPY !!!

Once a spy has accumulated information they think may be of benefit to their employer they make use of someone commonly known in the trade as a ‘handler’ – being an individual who not only knows the spy’s real name (Jessica Harkness) but who arranges to meet her on a regular basis to both receive and exchange information relevant to their calling. Be it in a park, at a bus stop or in a church.

Sometimes circumstances may change for the spy. She may move interstate or she may strike up a serious relationship with a man who is ignorant of her relationship with a handler. Or both.

Jessica Harkness moved interstate twice and changed her name to Jessica Thomson, the surname of a man with whom she had struck up a serious relationship, him being George Prosper Thomson.

JESSICA THOMSON KNEW WHO THE SOMERTON MAN WAS !!!

Or so suspected the detectives who were with her when she was shown Paul Lawson’s bust of the Somerton Man. As did Lawson himself.

Jessica was also a nurse. A nurse who needed to let her handler know how to make contact under such changed circumstances. She may have already told him of her relationship with Thomson and her intention to change her surname to his and move to Adelaide. Agent and handler relationships are much like a marriage in this respect, as even in the absence of real affection there is a duty of care.

In Adelaide she was lost to her handler. All contact suspended until they could find a way to communicate, and now that Jessica was in a serious relationship with Thomson any contact with another man would have to be done covertly. For that her handler needed her phone number and a means of contacting her through the Adelaide telephone directory.

All he knew was that her name now was Jessica Thomson, she now lived in Adelaide and she was a nurse.

Sister J. E. Thomson.

X3239.

He wrote the number down on the back cover of his Rubaiyat ..