The Somerton Man was a Cold War spy killed by a secret code and poison

What a spy story would need — and seems to have

Set aside hindsight and ask what a real Cold War death would look like, and the Somerton Man case supplies an unusual number of the ingredients. Inside the back cover of the recovered Rubáiyát, detectives found faint indentations — an unlisted telephone number, and five lines of capital letters that resembled nothing readable:

WRGOABABD
MLIAOI (a line struck through)
WTBIMPANETP
MLIAOI
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

No wartime or postwar cryptographer, amateur or professional, has ever broken it. That alone invites the espionage reading: real tradecraft of the era used one-time pads and book ciphers keyed to specific, hard-to-obtain editions — and a rare 1941 printing of a Persian poem, discarded in a stranger's unlocked car near where the body turned up, is exactly the kind of object a book cipher requires.

The traced phone number sharpened the picture. It led police to Jessica “Jo” Thomson, a nurse who lived only a few hundred metres from where the body was found. When shown a cast of the dead man's face, witnesses on the scene described her as visibly shaken — to the point of appearing close to fainting — yet she denied knowing him and declined to formally identify him. Investigators who spoke to her decades later found her evasive on the subject, and her daughter said in a televised interview that her mother had told her, in essence, that the truth about the man was known “at a level higher than the police force.” None of that is proof of an intelligence connection, but it is exactly the texture — a frightened contact, a withheld truth, official silence — that espionage cases genuinely have.

And the period backdrop was real, not invented after the fact. Adelaide in 1948 sat inside a world rapidly organising itself into two intelligence-obsessed blocs; Australia was, that same year, in the process of tightening its security relationship with British and American services after leaks were traced to Soviet contacts in Canberra. An unidentifiable man, dead of an undetectable poison, carrying a coded note and no name, is not a strange thing to suspect of espionage. It is, on its face, close to what espionage would look like if it went wrong.

What the code, the labels, and the decades actually show

Each striking detail has a mundane explanation that fits the facts at least as well as a spy story does — and in several cases better. Start with the code. Cryptographers who examined it in 1949, and researchers who have returned to it since, agree on one point: five short lines are not enough text to prove anything is a cipher at all. Computational linguist John Rehling, analysing the letter patterns in 2014, concluded the most statistically likely explanation was that the lines were initials — a personal shorthand for a list of words, names, or phrases, the way someone might jot the first letters of a poem, a prayer, or racing form notes to jog their memory. That reading fits the sample size far better than a formal cipher does, and it requires no espionage at all.

The removed clothing labels tell a similar story once placed in context. Cutting labels out of clothes was documented practice among people who wanted to vanish from a previous life — evading debt, family, a psychiatric history, or an unravelling marriage — not a signature exclusive to intelligence tradecraft. And the removal was imperfect: three separate dry-cleaning marks and a tag reading “T. Keane” survived on different garments, which is a poor result for a professionally trained operative erasing his own identity, and a plausible one for a distressed man doing it himself, hastily and incompletely.

The book cipher theory also runs into a documentary problem: no one has ever produced a name, a file, or a corroborated account from any Australian, British, Soviet, or American intelligence service placing the Somerton Man inside an actual operation. Seventy-plus years on — well past the point at which Cold War-era ASIO and Soviet files on Australia have been declassified or leaked — nothing has surfaced that names him, or ties the coded lines to a real message. The Lapstone Conference and other security meetings held in Australia that year establish that espionage was in the air in 1948, not that this man was part of it.

Most decisively, the identity itself has likely been resolved, and it points away from an intelligence background. In 2022, DNA extracted from hair embedded in the police death mask — not, notably, from the man's 2021 exhumation, whose embalmed remains yielded degraded DNA — allowed Professor Derek Abbott and genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick to build a family tree and match living relatives on both sides. Their conclusion: Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Footscray, Victoria, in 1905, whose known biography — an estranged wife, an engineering trade, no record of government, military-intelligence, or diplomatic service — resembles a man with a private crisis far more than a trained operative.

Why a beach death became a spy story

The Somerton Man case earns its staying power honestly: it is one of the very few unsolved deaths in the world with a matched physical clue this specific — a torn scrap, a matching rare book, a coded note — and specificity is what makes a mystery feel solvable rather than merely sad. A death with no evidence at all fades from memory. A death with a cipher sitting right there, tantalisingly almost readable, keeps drawing people back in, certain that one more pass will crack it.

It also arrived at the perfect moment to be read as espionage. Nineteen forty-eight sat at the true beginning of the Cold War, when the reflex to see a foreign hand behind any unexplained death was neither paranoid nor unusual — it was often correct. That reasonable period instinct has simply never faded from how the case is told, even as seventy-odd years of declassified archives have failed to produce a single document connecting this specific man to any intelligence service.

Unresolved cases also attract dedicated communities that keep them alive by design. Amateur cryptographers, genealogists, and true-crime researchers have spent decades on the Somerton Man precisely because it rewards obsession: every new technique — familial DNA, forensic genetic genealogy, computational linguistics — could plausibly be the one that finally cracks it, and each new attempt generates fresh coverage and fresh theorising, spy stories included.

And the human story underneath is genuinely poignant in a way that a mundane explanation can struggle to satisfy. A man dies utterly alone, unable even to be named, with a note reading “it is finished” sewn against his body. An espionage plot gives that death a shape and a reason. A private tragedy — a struggling, possibly suicidal engineer, estranged from his family, dying unrecognised on a beach — is a sadder and much more ordinary story, and ordinary stories rarely outcompete dramatic ones for the public's attention.