A missing sister, a plane that vanished and a secret lover: Teresa Drake's disappearance sparked global headlines. Now her family reveal she may have been an MI6 spy killed by the US… and have been warned not to 'ask questions'

By SABRINA PENTY, FOREIGN NEWS REPORTER Published: 13:48, 15 August 2026 | Updated: 13:48, 15 August 2026 On the evening of August 11, 1979, British secretary Teresa Drake boarded a private plane from Athens to Jeddah and was never seen again. Just months before, the 22-year-old had left a post in the Army and moved from the UK to Athens to work as a secretary at Babanaft, an international oil-trading company.  She was travelling with her millionaire boss and rumoured lover, oil trader Aladin Hassan Bahri, his Swedish business partner Peter Siemer, pilot Gunter Oeffner and co-pilot Michel Clement.  But the plane would vanish without a distress call or a crash site, leaving no immediate trace of what happened to the five people on board. Her mysterious disappearance sparked global headlines and, against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Iranian Revolution, triggered countless theories about the whereabouts of the plane and the young British woman on board.  For several decades, Teresa's family have been confronted with confounding claims. At times they were told Teresa was dead. In other instances, they believed she was alive and was being held hostage in the desert.  It was also suggested she might have been an MI6 agent caught up in a secret operation. And there were claims that the disappearance was linked to Bahri's business dealings, including an attempt from the US to foil an alleged oil-and-arms deal.  British secretary Teresa Drake went missing after boarding a flight from Athens to Jeddah in 1979 In this undated photograph, Teresa is pictured with her then-boyfriend before her move to Athens  Teresa's mysterious disappearance sparked global headlines, as well as widespread speculation on her whereabouts However, none of those theories has ever provided the family with a definitive explanation.  Eight years after Teresa's disappearance, the wreckage of the plane was found deep in the Egyptian desert. But the discovery did little to answer the question that has haunted Teresa's family for decades, and 47 years later they are still left wondering what happened to her.  This week marked the anniversary of her disappearance, and her sister Elizabeth Hammond exclusively spoke to the Daily Mail about the extraordinary events that followed.  From threats to her family, mysterious messages and a sudden government D-notice that eventually stopped the British Press reporting on the case, Elizabeth has likened much of the mystery surrounding her sister to a 'James Bond novel on speed'. However, for Elizabeth, one question continues to cross her mind. Was Teresa recruited by MI6, and was her disappearance connected to a secret operation? 'It would make sense,' Elizabeth says. 'She did leave the Army very suddenly, which is apparently where they often recruit you from.' The last time Elizabeth saw her sister was over Christmas in 1978.  As they sat together in the pews of a church during a Midnight Mass service, Elizabeth remembers her sister saying to her: 'I'm so excited, Lizzie, but I can't really tell you what I'm doing.' 'I had no idea what she meant - I was 13 at the time,' Elizabeth recalls.  She also notes a distressing phone call that her grandmother had with Teresa just days before she went missing.   Elizabeth says Teresa told her grandmother, 'Tell Daddy I'm coming home, I'm scared, this is my last flight.' 'That was her last phone call. So she knew things weren't going well, and she was clearly very scared. That's the thing you think about, because she was such a character - nothing would get in her way. But clearly, towards the end, she was out of her depth,' Elizabeth says.  Six months after Teresa disappeared, someone claiming to have links to the security services told her father that she had been recruited into MI6 from the Army, but other people subsequently came forward with conflicting stories. Some claimed she was alive and being held hostage. There was even an alleged ransom note published in a Middle East magazine demanding £6million for Teresa and Bahri. But sources also often said she was dead. 'There were lots of strange people who came forward with different versions,' Elizabeth says.  'Sometimes my father would have to drive down to London to meet some random person and be told something new. You never really knew what to believe.'  Elizabeth also recalls how one man came forward and told the family that he had seen Teresa shortly after the plane landed and she was later murdered.  'He told my father something very personal about my sister that my father hadn't known - that she was a mild epileptic...This person said, "To prove I'm telling the truth, this is the drug she took – I saw her with it after the plane was forced to land, and then she was murdered".' Teresa's family have spent 47 years wondering what happened to her There have been claims Teresa was an MI6 agent Another theory was that the plane had been hijacked by forces linked to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the passengers were being held hostage.  According to an account given to Elizabeth's family, the alleged hijacking was intended to prevent Bahri and Babanaft from completing a major oil-and-arms deal. 'If you look at the original media coverage, that's what was reported: that the Libyans, allegedly on behalf of the US, didn't want Aladdin al-Bahri and Babanaft to complete a big oil-and-arms deal, and forced the plane to divert and murdered everyone on landing,' Elizabeth explained.  There were also claims that Teresa and Bahri were romantically involved, and had even married.  'It's one of many strange, bizarre claims, and I have no idea how true it is. No one else ever mentioned it, and she certainly hadn't,' Elizabeth says. And as her father continued to dig for answers, the family say they began receiving increasingly disturbing warnings. On one occasion, photographs of Elizabeth were sent to her father while she was still at school, accompanied by a note saying: 'Shut up, or she's next.' Then, around 1988, when Elizabeth was working on Regent Street, she says a man approached her on her way to the Underground. 'A good-looking guy came up and said, "Hi, Lizzie." I said hello, and he said, "Tell your father - we know where you live... and tell him to shut up."' Elizabeth says she spent years afterwards feeling frightened and unsafe. 'I didn't trust people for a long time – you think, if they can kill her, what might they do to me?' There were also strange incidents involving Teresa's possessions. When her father travelled to Athens to clear out her flat, he brought back photographs of scenery that meant nothing to him. Later, the family home was broken into and, according to Elizabeth, the only things taken were those photographs. 'Whatever expensive watch we had was left untouched; they just took the photographs,' she says. Amid her sister's disappearance and the chilling events surrounding it, Elizabeth says she spent years feeling scared and unsafe.  Teresa's sister, Elizabeth Hammond (pictured), spoke exclusively to the Daily Mail about her sister's disappearance In another twist, after years of conflicting narratives and press speculation, the British government reportedly issued a D-notice on coverage of Teresa's disappearance. 'I think there were things the British government didn't want known — maybe a mixture of the US and Britain,' Elizabeth says.  'In a way, it was actually good for us, because the media coverage stopped - by that point it wasn't achieving anything; it was just dragging on an old story, and much of it felt made up. 'As to why we weren't told - we were never consulted about anything. We were just ignored, treated as the unfortunate relatives. The D-notice was as much a surprise to us as to everybody else.' For Elizabeth, the lack of answers has been one of the most painful parts of her sister's disappearance.  'It's one of the things I'd really like: someone from MI6 to come forward and tell us, definitively, one way or the other.' 'We still haven't been told much. There must be so much we could have been told -and never were, and still haven't been - even something as simple as confirming she was in MI6 or giving us the unredacted files,' she says. To mark the anniversary, Elizabeth posted on social media urging anyone who might know what happened to Teresa to come forward.  It is something she does every year in the hope one day someone might be able to tell her the truth.   'We deserve the truth and, at the very least, to have the redacted files given to us without the documents being redacted!' she wrote in a recent Instagram post.  'We have forgiven anyone concerned a long time ago. But we do believe that our sister deserves some justice and that it’s time we were told the truth.' After decades of uncertainty, she says she still wants the family to know what Teresa was doing on the plane, whether she was involved with MI6 and what happened on the night she disappeared.  Her father died without ever knowing what had happened to his daughter. 'It's bad enough losing a child, but not knowing what happened to them is horrific,' Elizabeth says. 'Maybe in the beginning there was something going on none of us knew about - maybe some big US arms-for-oil deal involving Syria, I don't know - maybe there were reasons it couldn't be made public.  'But even 20 years later, while my father was still alive, there was clearly a lot of information we could have been given.'  Elizabeth also hopes that speaking out about her family's experience can help other people whose loved ones have gone missing.  'If there's a way to ensure an appropriate minimum amount of information is given to relatives in situations like this, to give them some closure, some help, some visibility into what their loved one was doing, that would be a genuinely positive thing to come out of all this.'  Elizabeth holds on to hope while also keeping the memory of her sister alive. 'I remember her as rule-breaking, someone who lived life to the absolute fullest.  'By 22, she'd served on the front line in Northern Ireland, lived in Athens, lived in London. One of my last memories is Midnight Mass... telling me - without quite being able to tell me - what she was about to do, and how excited and happy she was.'