FREE now SUBSCRIBE Invalid email Sign up to the Secret Elves Club fornow We will use your email address only for sending you newsletters. Please see our Privacy Notice for details of your data protection rights.

CONSIDERED by many as the most beautiful spy, Vera Eriksen could be a rival to Dutch temptress Mata Hari. But who exactly was she? Her background is shrouded in mystery. But the biographer and historian David Tremain has trawled through her official MI5 files to reveal some hard facts about her extraordinary life - and the possible end of her espionage career in Scotland in 1940.

On that day in September, David discovered, a beautiful young woman and her two accomplices pitched up in the small Scottish town of Buckie. The native-born Russian,Vera, and her two companions, Karl Theodore Drueke and Werner Heinrich Walti, had been sent to help spies infiltrate Britain. Brought over by seaplane from Norway, the trio completed the final stretch to the shores of the Moray Firth in a rubber dingy, before making their way to the nearest train station in Portgordon. But their arrival hadn't gone unnoticed because, despite possessing maps, they got lost. They asked directions from the station porter, who was instantly suspicious and telephoned the police. The trio was duly arrested. "It seems that they made the mistake of believing the station's name sign," says David. "But of course it had been changed, a common practice in Britain during the Second World War, to confuse any incoming German spies." What is more, the locals noted, the trouser hems of all three were sopping wet from wading ashore. "This would have raised a few red flags," says David. "It was a dry day so there was no reason why their trousers should have been wet."

Vera Eriksen (right) was arrested after porter John Geddes (left) became suspicious

It is thought that Vera was born Vera Schalburg in Siberia, close to the Chinese border, on November 23, 1912. When the Russian Revolution started in October 1917, Vera's family fled to Copenhagen where it is believed they stayed until 1929 before moving to Paris. There Vera studied classical and acrobatic dance under the ballerina Anna Pavlova. "She led a somewhat vivid life as a ballet dancer," says David. "Vera's family were poor, having lost most of their fortune, and she was likely the main source of income." It was while in Paris in 1930 that Vera met a so-called White Russian, whom she knew as Ivan Ignatieff. "He was an unscrupulous blackguard, who appears to have had a strange hold over her," David explains. Hired to pass secrets to the Russians, Vera mixed business with pleasure and married Ignatieff. But their marriage became abusive and on one occasion he stabbed her. Ignatieff was reportedly shot by the Bolsheviks in 1936. The first time Vera became involved with the Abwehr, the German Intelligence Service, was through Captain Winding Christensen, a Danish engineer, also known as "Dr Kaiser" whom she met on a return visit to Copenhagen in 1940. Chosen because she was Russian, Vera was employed to work in Belgium against the Soviet government, at this time under the name Schalburg.

Vera and her accomplices landed near Buckie Harbour but were soon captured

It is thought she was given a Danish passport by the Abwehr, probably in the name of Vera Eriksen. "Her first real mission for the Abwehr came in September 1940 when she, along with Drueke and Walti, was sent to Britain," says David. When Vera and her accomplices were arrested in Scotland, they were found to have a radio transmitter, pistol, maps and code disk. However,Vera had nothing on her that suggested she was working for the Abwehr. Drueke and Walti were tried and convicted under the Treachery Act in June 1941 and hanged in Wandsworth Prison in south London soon afterwards. But why wasn't Vera charged as a spy? "One of the reasons was quite often because they had been turned as a double agent by MI5," David explains. "But Vera always said that she did not want to continue being a spy after the war. "However, I can't think of any other logical reason why MI5 didn't prosecute her."

One of Vera's accomplices, Werner Walti

The other accomplice, Karl Drueke