JESTYN'S STORY, PART 2: THE THIRD MAN? UPDATED 5th January, VERSE 70 STEGANOGRAPHY EXAMPLE..

 

'The Third Man', a truly classic 1949 movie. Not only for its subject matter but also for its extraordinarily finely detailed work and the use of, at the time, leading-edge cinematographic techniques. The dark sewers, long shadows being cast, piles of rubble from bombed-out buildings, and distorted faces all of which reflected the environment of Vienna at that time. A city divided, corruption, espionage, and intrigue. It was a masterful film.

Was there a 'third man' in the Somerton Man case? was Jestyn another 'Anna'? Interestingly, we do have a link to Vienna.

We also know that there was a third man, and there may have been two. Surely that wouldn't be possible?

THIRD MAN # 1.

This man is the third instructor who was present not only when Alf apparently first met Jestyn in 1944 but 'possibly' (trying to confirm that at the time of writing) in August 1945 when she gave Alf the copy of the Rubaiyat that contained the handwritten 'inscription' of verse 70. As we now know, the page containing the inscription and the title page next to it, contained a lot more than just an inscription, more on that later.

This instructor was an interesting man, moving from the ranks relatively easily such that he finished his war as an Acting Captain.

Like Alf and Tom Musgrave, this man was attached to  Water Transport. But, unlike Alf and Tom, this man's role was not as an instructor of mechanics, this man was with Signals. His name? George French. His role was to instruct various members of the Water Transport group in the use of WT equipment and the various Q Codes, Z Codes, and Pro Signs. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest that people thus trained would also have access to other forms of codes, the Hill cipher or similar for example?

An example of steganography from Verse 70

Words/codes written within words and images as described in the SOE's 'INK H' Technique

The image of the grapes above comes from the Title page of the Boxall Rubaiyat. Each grape, leaf and stem contains micro written codes which you should be able to make out.

Could this be some of the work initiated by the Signals Officer, George French?

The image above is one of more than 50 taken of Verse 70  over the past 3 days for a Facebook page. Each word. comma, dash, and question mark contains micro-written code. It is the finest example of handwritten steganography ever seen according to one, very senior, Military man.

The Somerton Man code page, proven now to contain long strings of code hidden beneath the darker ink markings of the Police or whichever agency, could well, in my view, have been taken down from radio transmissions. Hence the long strings and the irregular shapes of some of the letters, almost as if they couldn't quite fit all of the microcode into, for example, the first letter M on line 1 so they added some extra bits as indeed they did with the one of the letters 'S' on the last line of the code page.

George is shown as being in Sydney with the Water Transport Group from 1st May 1944 through to October 1944. It appears he was in Sydney from 19th June 1945 through until the end of July with one record apparently showing him in Sydney during August 1945 (this needs to be confirmed.)

THE SECOND 'THIRD' MAN

What a title. The theory I raise relates to the Somerton Man, is it just possible that he was a 'substitute'? Was he there to take the fall for the real 'spy', the man who was possibly about to jump ship and join Western intelligence agencies? That would certainly explain a lot of the unusual happenings that followed the finding of the body on December 1st 1948.

Consider this, when the book was found, it wasn't long after that the code page, dutifully later marked up, was discovered. By this time there can be little doubt that Western intelligence services would have been well aware of the code page and its concealed messages but why would they publish it?

But the published one wasn't the real code, it was a marked over version. Yes, the real code was there but it wasn't readily visible.

The message being sent by publishing the book was simple, they were telling the opposition that yes, we have the book and we found a code, and here it is, but it was a marked over version. Would that be enough to lull the enemy into a false sense of security? Would they think that the information contained in the real, unmarked over, code was now safe?

Would they have had to do that if the torn piece hadn't have been produced?

Could it be that there was a double switch? Was the man on the beach our 'Harry Lime'?

Copyright: Gordon Cramer