AGENT ZIGZAG: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy by Ben Macintyre
Bloomsbury £14.99 ZIGZAG: The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Eddie Chapman
by Nicholas Booth Portrait £12.99
Secret intelligence attracts oddballs, some hugely talented. Many practitioners go mad, because they inhabit a world in which loyalties are confused, trust usually mistaken, means and ends problematic. During the second world war, British “humint” (information about the enemy gathered by spies) was poor. London never recruited agents of value in either Berlin or Tokyo. However, this failure paled into insignificance alongside two great triumphs. One was MI6’s code-breaking operation, based at Bletchley Park. The second was MI5’s “double-cross” system. To a man, German agents who landed in Britain were captured. Some 40 were then “turned”, and used to transmit false information back to the Nazis, above all in support of the June 1944 Fortitude deception plan. For weeks after D-Day in Normandy, Hitler remained convinced that the allies also intended to land in the Pas de Calais. Even if the German secret service was amazingly credulous, the orchestration of its phoney spy network represented a historic achievement by the British.
The most exotic of MI5’s “doubles” was Eddie Chapman. His story would defy belief, were it not supported by a massof documentation in both German archives and newly declassified MI5 files, of which Ben Macintyre and Nicholas Booth make splendid use. Booth’s version of the story is less well written, but profits from the assistance of its subject’s widow, who has provided some racy detail.
Chapman was born in 1914, the son of an improvident Durham publican. In trouble from an early age, he spent some months in the ranks of the Coldstream Guards before deserting and drifting into crime. He became well known to the police as a safe-blower and fraudster. He became equally well known to a host of pretty girls as a looker and spender, with an irresistible line in chat. When the Germans occupied the Channel Islands in June 1940, among the flotsam they inherited was Chapman. On the run from the British Continued on page 46t Continued from page 45 mainland police, he had decamped to Jersey with a pretty blonde teen-ager named Betty Farmer, jumped through a hotel window to escape after being identified in St Helier, and committed further robberies until he was caught and jailed. From his cell, he offered his services to the German Abwehr. After some hesitation, they recruited and exhaustively trained him in France. In December 1942, he was parachuted into Britain with a wireless set and the promise of £15,000 if he carried out some sabotage operations.
On his muddy arrival in Cam-bridgeshire, Chapman demanded to be taken to the British secret service. “Name?” demanded the policeman booking him. “George
Clarke will do, for now.” “Trade or profession?” “Well, put me down as independent.” That bit was true, anyway. Most wartime attempts to enlist crooks in the service of their country failed miserably. For instance, a confidence trickster parachuted into France by SOE simply disappeared, taking with him a large wad of cash intended for the resistance.
But Chapman persuaded MI5 of his halfway honourable intentions, and began to transmit to his German masters. Bletchley intercepts showed that the Abwehr swallowed his story. An elaborate pantomime was devised, for an explosion to take place near the de Havil-land Mosquito factory at Hatfield, of which hints were prominently reported in the press. When the Germans bought this, too, Chapman offered the British a new scheme: he would return tohis Nazi masters, and kill Hitler.
The latter proposal was thought to be a bridge too far, but in the summer of 1943 Chapman was indeed shipped back to the Abwehr, via Lisbon. The Germans welcomed “their” man with open arms, presented him with the Iron Cross, and took him off to Norway for several months’ holiday with yet another beautiful girl, and plenty of cash, some of which he used to buy a sailing boat.
In the summer of 1944, he was again parachuted into Britain, to an even warmer welcome from MI5. He spent the rest of the war exchanging friendly messages with the Abwehr, some designed to deceive the enemy about the targeting of their V-weapons. “Tin Eye” Stephens, British custodian of the double-cross agents, wrote afterwards: “Fiction has not and probably never will produce an espionage story to rival in fascination and improbability the true story of Edward Chapman, whom only war could invest with virtue.”
There are endless delightful twists to the tale. For instance, the policeman who escorted Chapman to London in 1942 was able to confirm his identity because the two men had served in the same Guards platoon. During 1943-45 (and maybe even after the war, thinks Macintyre) British intelligence was funding Chapman’s London “fiancée”, Freda, and their daughter. Meanwhile, German intelligence paid a regular stipend to his Norwegian lover in Oslo. Although MI5 yearned to believe Chapman was a patriot, in truth he seems simply to have been one of those people who live for thrills. The fastidious Sir John Masterman, director of the double-cross operation, was obviously thinking of Chapman when he wrote later that there are “certain persons who have a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and who attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other,so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied”.
One of the occupational hazards of intelligence is that its officers become so consumed by the intrinsic beauty of an operation that they lose sight of what it is, or is not, achieving. Both sides invested heavily in their exotic plaything Chapman. How much he contributed to the British war effort is debatable, however, save by keeping the Abwehr amused. He assisted MI5’s purpose of keeping alive in German bosoms the delusion that they possessed real spies, at liberty on enemy soil. But he was much less important to British deception operations than other great double-cross agents such as Tricycle and Garbo.
In 1945, Chapman returned to the underworld with some cash from MI5, and an immunity deal for prewar misdeeds. Amazingly, he married, and stayed married to, Betty Farmer, the woman with whom he had fled to Jersey in 1939. Although he often appeared in court, he never went to jail again, maybe because he profited from all that British and German training. The couple ended up running a health spa, at which he once entertained his former Abwehr controller.
Picaresque is an inadequate adjective to describe Chapman, or indeed MacIntyre’s and Booth’s books about him. Both offer splendidly vivid portraits of the man and the British and German spooks with whom he dallied. Chapman, who survived until 1997, must have possessed extraordinary powers as a fantasist, to live a lie for months on end, in the hands of the Nazi intelligence machine. His survival must also have owed something to the Abwehr’s yearning, common to all spymasters, to believe in “its” man.
In truth, he was nobody’s man — simply a rogue possessed of astonishing chutzpah, which carried him through one of the most notable odysseys of the war. One puts down his story fascinated by the man, but glad never to have met him. He would have had the watch off your wrist while shaking hands. q
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