Double Agent Celery: Mi5's Crooked Hero

Description

With Britain braced for a German invasion, MI5 recruited an ex RNAS officer, come confidence trickster, called Walter Dicketts as a double agent. Codenamed Celery, Dicketts was sent to Lisbon with the seemingly impossible mission of persuading the Germans he was a traitor and then extract crucial secrets. Once there, the Nazis spirited him off to Germany. With his life on the line, Dicketts had to outwit his interrogators in Hamburg and Berlin before returning to Britain as, in the Nazis eyes, a German spy. Despite discovering he had been betrayed as an MI5 plant before he even left for Germany, Celery somehow got back to Lisbon. After that he persuaded an Abwehr Officer to defect, and spent nine months undercover in Brazil. A mixture of hero and crook, Dicketts was worldly and intelligent, charming and charismatic. Sometimes rich and sometimes poor, his private life was a web of complexity and deception. Using family and official records, police records, newspaper articles and memories, the author unravels the tangled yet true story of Double Agent Celery.

Author description

Carolinda Witt is the granddaughter of MI5 s double agent celery aka Walter Dicketts. After growing up in Africa, she has sailed around the Caribbean, skied throughout the Alps, scuba-dived in the Pacific and, at the age of twenty-one, became one of the first female hot-air balloon pilots in Britain. In 1988 she flew the Virgin Jumbo Jet shaped balloon across Australia in the Trans-Australia balloon race. Following being co-owner of a successful medical supplies company, Carolinda developed a modern version of the popular anti-aging yoga routine known as The Five Tibetan Rites now practised by thousands of people all over the world. She is the author of the bestselling T5T: The Five Tibetan Exercise Rites and The 10-Minute Rejuvenation Plan. She lives in Sydney, Australia.