Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal, playboy and safe-breaker, was serving
a sentence for burglary on the Island of Jersey when the Nazis invaded the
Channel Islands in 1940. In what he later claimed was an attempt to escape
to Britain, he offered to spy for the Germans. Chapman was taken to a school
for spies in occupied France run by Stephan von Gröning, a senior officer of
the Abwehr, the German secret service. After months of intensive training,
he was despatched with a singular mission: to sabotage the British war
effort by blowing up an aircraft factory outside London.
At 2.13am on 16 December 1942, a German spy dropped from a Focke-Wulf
reconnaissance plane over Cambridgeshire. His parachute opened and he
floated down. His nose bled copiously. The spy was well equipped. He wore
British-issue army landing boots and helmet. In his pocket was a wallet
taken from a British soldier killed at Dieppe four months earlier: inside
were two fake identity cards. His pack contained matches impregnated with
quinine for “secret writing”, a wireless receiver, a military map, £990 in
used notes, a Colt revolver, an entrenching tool, and plain-glass spectacles
for disguise. In the turn-up of his right trouser leg was sewn a small
Cellophane package containing a single suicide pill of potassium cyanide.
The name of the spy was Edward Arnold Chapman. The British police also knew
him as Edward Edwards, Edward Simpson and Arnold Thompson. His German
spymasters have given him the codename of Fritz or, affectionately,
“Fritzchen” — Little Fritz. The British secret services as yet had no name
for him, although the radio traffic concerning “Fritz” had been intercepted
and decoded. The Cambridge police had been instructed to be on the lookout
for an individual referred to only as “Agent X”. That night Martha Convine
had been woken by a plane droning overhead. Her husband George, foreman of
Apes Hall Farm, Ely, was snoring steadily. Martha heard a loud banging on
the door. She shook George awake, put on her dressing gown and peered out of
the window. “Who is it?” A man’s voice replied: “A British airman.” It was
3.30am. For the past hour, Chapman had been stumbling around in wet celery
fields, dazed and still traumatised from his descent. The figure on the
doorstep might have emerged from a swamp. Martha “noticed he had blood on
his face”. You can’t be too careful in wartime, so she asked him where his
plane was. He gestured vaguely at the countryside: “Across the fields.”
Chapman did not start making sense until he was in the kitchen with a cup of
tea. He had asked to use the telephone and George, a special constable,
dialled the police station at Ely. Chapman reached into his pocket as the
police walked in and pulled out a pistol, saying: “I expect the first thing
you want is this.” He unloaded it and handed it over. At police divisional
headquarters in Ely, Chapman was stripped, body-searched, issued with new
clothing and brought before the Deputy Chief Constable. Chapman was wary: he
did not like being inside a police station and he was not in the habit of
telling the truth to policemen. “I need to speak to the British secret
services, when I will have a very interesting story to tell.” Two men in
civilian clothes arrived in a Black Maria, and Chapman was driven to London.
At Ham Common in West London they turned through a gate in a high wooden
fence topped by barbed wire and drew up in front of a large, ugly Victorian
mansion. Chapman was taken to the basement and locked inside. A man with a
monocle opened the door, peered hawkishly at him, said nothing, and then
went away. A photographer took his picture. Chapman fought to keep his head
up. With a supreme effort he stared into the lens. His face in the
photograph is drained by fatigue and stress. But there is something else.
Behind the drooping eyelids and stubble lies the very faint trace of a
smile. Lieutenant Colonel Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, the commander of Camp
O20, had a very specialised skill: he broke people. He crushed them,
psychologically, into very small pieces and then, if he thought it
worthwhile, he would put them back together again. He considered this to be
an art. “A breaker is born and not made,” he said. In photographs, Stephens
might be the caricature Gestapo interrogator, with the glinting monocle and
“vays of making you talk”. He certainly did have ways of making people talk,
but they were not the brutal, obvious ways of the Gestapo. Behind the tin
eye was an instinctive and inspired amateur psychologist. Stephens spoke
Urdu, Arabic, Somali, Amharic, French, German and Italian, but this
multilingualism should not be taken to indicate that he was broad-minded
about other races and nations. He was ragingly xenophobic. He disliked
“weeping and romantic fat Belgians”, “shifty Polish Jews” and
“unintelligent” Icelanders. He also detested homosexuals. Above all, he
hated Germans. In 1940, the government had set up Camp 020 for the
interrogation and imprisonment of suspected spies, subversives and enemy
aliens in Latchmere House, a gloomy mansion in West London. Colonel
Stephens, a Gurkha officer seconded to MI5, terrified his underlings almost
as much as the prisoners. He never removed his monocle (he was said to sleep
in it). He thought of himself as a master of the interrogative arts. Some
colleagues thought he was quite mad. What few disputed was that he was
outstanding at his job: establishing the guilt of the enemy spy, extracting
vital information, scaring him witless, winning his trust and then, finally,
turning him over to MI5 for use as a double agent. At 9.30am on December 17,
Eddie Chapman found himself in Interrogation Room 3 of Camp 020, facing this
strange, angry-looking man. “No chivalry. No gossip. No cigarettes . . . a
spy in war should be at the point of bayonet.” A stenographer recorded every
word. “Your name is Chapman, is it?” “Yes, Sir.” “You are here in a British
Secret Service prison and it’s our job in wartime to see that we get your
whole story. Do you see?” The threat didn’t need to be made. Chapman told
him everything, in a great tumbling torrent of confession. He told Stephens
about his criminal past, the Jersey prison, his recruitment, his training in
Nantes and Berlin and the parachute drop. He told him about the codes he
knew, the sabotage techniques he had learned, the secret writing, the
passwords, and wireless frequencies. When he described his mission to blow
up the De Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield, north of London, Stephens
interrupted. “Pretty hazardous undertaking, isn’t it?” “Yes.” “You were
rather a favourite. Did they trust you?” “Yes.” “They said they thought
rather highly of you, that you could get in anywhere and do virtually
anything?” “Yes, I could.”
In the course of 48 hours, Chapman provided more than 50 descriptions of
individuals, including Von Gröning, his spymaster. He told them some things
the British knew, such as wireless codes they had broken, which allowed them
to test Chapman’s truthfulness — but he also told them much that was new,
painting an astonishingly detailed picture of German espionage methods.
That night, Chapman wrote a letter to Stephens. It is an extraordinary
document, a combination of self-pity, self-examination and self-assertion,
reflecting the internal agony of the spy: “One does not expect gratitude
from one’s own country but allow me to draw your attention to a few facts.
For 13 months now I have been under German rule. During this time even when
undergoing detention I was treated with strict fairness and friendliness. I
made many friends — people who I respect and who I think came to like me —
unfortunately for them and for me. “I set out from the first day to try to
mass together facts, places, dates etc. concerning the German organisation .
. . Don’t think I’m asking for any friendship now, it’s a little late — on
the other hand this strange thing patriotism. I laugh a little cynically
when I think of it sometimes. I have fought the fight and my country won
(why, I can’t explain). I wish like hell there had been no war — I begin to
wish I had never started this affair. To spy and cheat on one’s friends it’s
not nice it’s dirty. However, I started, this affair and I will finish it.
Don’t think I ask anything for this, I don’t. It seems very strange to be
working for two governments — one offers me the chance of money, success and
a career. The other offers me a prison cell.” While Chapman was writing,
Stephens was gathering his interrogators for a conference on what to do with
this potentially very valuable crook. “If Chapman is to be believed, he
offered to work for the Germans as a means of escape (and) on landing, he
immediately put himself at the disposal of the British authorities to work
against the Germans . . . He is possessed of courage and nerve.” Chapman
revealed that he had been offered a huge reward by the Germans if his
mission succeeded, and he seemed to retain a strong affection for Von
Gröning. Without being asked, he offered to return to France and work for
MI5 behind enemy lines. Could he be trusted? Chapman had a long criminal
record, and an even longer history as a philanderer. He had an illegitimate
child in Britain, an ex-wife in London and a string of former lovers, as
well as a wide network of criminal associates. Yet Stephens was convinced
that Chapman would make a first-class double agent. That evening Camp 020
sent a message to the commander of B1A, the MI5 section responsible for
running double-agents: “In our opinion, Chapman genuinely means to work for
the British against the Germans. By his courage and resourcefulness, he is
ideally fitted to be an agent.” Thomas Argyll Robertson, the head of the B1A
team, known as “Tar” on account of his initials, had been following every
twist and readily agreed to examine Chapman as a potential recruit. But
Chapman would need a codename. On December 18, Tar sent a message to all B1A
personnel: “We have chosen the name of Zigzag for Fritzchen.” There was no
indication that the Abwehr suspected anything was amiss, but to sustain Von
Gröning’s faith, some sort of demonstration of Chapman’s skills would be
required. “We should do all that we can to arrange a speedy and spectacular
explosion at the de Havilland works,” wrote one of his MI5 spymasters.
Persuading the Germans that the aircraft factory had been wrecked, without
causing any real damage, would require some powerful magic. So a magician
was summoned. Enter Jasper Maskelyne, professional conjuror, star of the
West End and Britain’s most flamboyant secret weapon. Maskelyne had offered
to contribute his skills to the war effort. With the help of his Magic Gang,
comprising an analytical chemist, a cartoonist, a criminal, a
stage-designer, a picture restorer, a carpenter and a lone professional
soldier, he had been used to bamboozle the enemy in a variety of bizarre
ways. Maskelyne helped to win the Battle of El Alamein by creating an array
of “tricks, swindles and devices” to convince Erwin Rommel that the British
counter-attack was coming from the south, rather than the north. According
to Charles Fraser-Smith — a supplier of military gadgets who would later be
immortalised as “Q” in the James Bond novels — Maskelyne was called in to
make it “look, from the air, as if the place had been blown to kingdom
come”. It was decided to erect a veil of camouflage so convincing that it
would seem as if a very large bomb had exploded inside the factory. The
camouflage technicians constructed four replicas of sub-transformers out of
wood and papier-mâché, painted a metallic grey. Two would be rolled over, as
if blown sideways by the blast. Meanwhile, the real transformers would be
covered with netting and corrugated iron sheets painted to look, from high
above, like a “vast hole”. The walls would be draped with tarpaulins,
painted like half-demolished brick walls, while the other walls would be
covered in soot as if blackened. Rubble and debris would be spread to a
radius of 100ft. With the help of an MI5 radio expert named Ronnie Reed,
Chapman sent a wireless message to Von Gröning: “Ready to go. Begin
preparations for my return. F”. To convince the Germans, MI5 set about
persuading newspapers to publish false accounts. Fighter Command was
instructed to watch out for reconnaissance planes over Hatfield, but on no
account to attack them. As darkness fell on January 29, a team of camouflage
experts slipped into the de Havilland aircraft factory. Dawn broke on a
panorama of devastation. The site was “surrounded by chaos”, in the words of
one MI5 officer. Brick, rubble, lumps of concrete and splintered wood were
spread around. The smaller building appeared to have been struck with a
giant mallet, while the dummy transformers lay smashed. Tar Robertson
professed himself delighted. This, wrote Fraser-Smith, was “Maskelyne’s
masterpiece”. Chapman dispatched a triumphant message to his German masters:
Von Gröning replied with warm congratulations. MI5 agreed that Agent Zigzag
should now be deployed as a double agent, and sent back to occupied France.
Tin Eye Stephens was fascinated by this young man, a criminal motivated by
an extraordinary combination of patriotism, love of danger and almost
suicidal courage: “The story of many a spy is commonplace and drab,” wrote
Stephens. “The story of Chapman is different. In fiction it would be
rejected as improbable. The subject is a crook, but as a crook he is by no
means a failure and, in his own estimation, is something of a prince of the
underworld. He has no scruples and will stop at nothing. He makes no bargain
with society and money is a means to an end. Of fear, he knows nothing, and
he has a deep-rooted hatred of the Hun. Adventure to Chapman is the breath
of life. Given adventure, he has the courage to achieve the
unbelievable.Today he is a German parachute spy; tomorrow he will undertake
a desperate hazard as an active double agent, the stake for which is his
life. Without adventure, he would rebel. For Chapman, only one thing is
certain, the greater the adventure, the greater is the chance of success.”
Extracted from Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre, Bloomsbury £14.99. Available
from Times Books First for £13.49. Buy it here.
