AT A SECRET CEREMONY in Oslo in the spring of 1943 the Abwehr, German military intelligence, presented Eddie Chapman, its only British agent, with the Iron Cross in recognition of his “outstanding zeal and success”.

What most impressed the Abwehr was his successful sabotage of the De Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield which built the Mosquito bombers then pounding German cities. Ben Macintyre’s absorbing biography contains a dramatic photograph of the wrecked factory with debris strewn around and damaged buildings covered in tarpaulins.

The “sabotage”, however, was a hoax — part of the most successful deception in the history of the warfare, the Double Cross System, which comprehensively fooled the Abwehr. The hoax, devised by MI5, was orchestrated by the master- illusionist Jasper Maskelyne, the grandson of Victorian Britain’s most celebrated conjurer, whose “Magic Gang” had bamboozled the enemy with fake tanks, Spitfires and submarines.

Eddie Chapman was a British double agent codenamed Zigzag. Thanks largely to the British success in breaking German codes and ciphers, all the Abwehr spies infiltrated into Britain were captured. Some were then “turned” and used to feed disinformation back to an unsuspecting enemy who swallowed most of it whole. The wartime MI5 officer and future Oxford Vice-Chancellor J. C. Masterman wrote later with understandable pride that “by means of the double agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country”.

Chapman was not the most important of the double agents. That honour belongs to Juan Pujol (code-named Garbo), who was also awarded the Iron Cross and who played a crucial role during the D-Day landings by deceiving Hitler and his high command into believing that the main Allied attack was coming not in Normandy but around Calais.

Though less influential than Pujol, Chapman was probably the most colourful of the agents who double-crossed the Germans. With the help of Chapman’s newly declassified nine-volume MI5 file, Macintyre succeeds in bringing him vividly to life. It is unlikely that a more engaging study of espionage and deception will be published this year.

Agent Zigzag underscores one of the main conclusions of the brilliant recent Cambridge PhD thesis by Emily Wilson on the battle between MI5 and the Abwehr during the Second World War. As Dr Wilson shows, Abwehr recruitment was fundamentally flawed. The German agents landed in Britain lacked the ideological commitment of their Soviet counterparts. An Abwehr officer later admitted that they were on the lookout instead for agents who wanted money and excitement: “Men were preferred who were quite obviously living beyond their income, having expensive tastes, and were devoted to women, alcohol and other disintegrating influences.”

Chapman was a classic example. “For Chapman,” writes Macintyre, “breaking the law was a vocation.” He began his long criminal career in Soho during the early 1930s. There, he wrote later: “I mixed with all types of tricky people, racecourse crooks, thieves, prostitutes and the flotsam of the night-life of a great city.” Chapman was also a compulsive womaniser. According to one account he made money by seducing married women, then blackmailing them with compromising photographs that he threatened to show to their husbands. Once he discovered gelignite, Chapman made far more money as a safebreaker, driving a Bentley and dressing in Savile Row suits. In 1939, while he was on the run from the police in Britain, he was jailed in Jersey for housebreaking and larceny. In 1941, during the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, he offered to spy for Germany. Surprisingly, despite his long record of proven unreliability, the Abwehr eventually accepted his offer.

In the early hours of December 16, 1942, Chapman was dropped by parachute over the Cambridgeshire countryside, equipped with false identity cards, £990 in used notes, a radio set and a suicide pill.

By morning he had contacted the local police to ask them to put him in touch with “the British Intelligence Service”. Within a few days he had become a double agent. MI5’s wartime interrogation centre, Camp 020, reported: “In our opinion, Chapman should be used to the fullest extent . . . He genuinely means to work for the British against the Germans.”

When Macintyre read history at Cambridge in the 1980s the influence of intelligence and intelligence agencies on the 20th century was not even on the syllabus. It can scarcely have occurred to him then that 20 years later more final-year Cambridge historians would study this subject than any other — and that some would find Agent Zigzag on their booklists.

Damian Lewis reads Agent Zigzag on Book of the Week on Radio 4 from January 29

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