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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