Agent Zigzag Read online

  ALSO BY BEN MACINTYRE

  The Man Who Would Be King:

  The First American in Afghanistan

  The Englishman’s Daughter:

  A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One

  The Napoleon of Crime:

  The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief

  Forgotten Fatherland:

  The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche

  Copyright © 2007 by Ben Macintyre

  Excerpt from Double Cross copyright © 2012 by Ben Macintyre

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain as Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman, Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Macintyre, Ben, 1963–

  Agent Zigzag : a true story of Nazi espionage, love, and betrayal / Ben Macintyre.—1st ed.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Chapman, Edward Arnold. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Germany. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Great Britain. 4. Spies—Great Britain—Biography. 5. Spies—Germany—Biography. 6. Espionage—Germany—History—20th century. 7. Espionage—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title.

  D810.S8C385 2007

  940.54'8641092—dc22 2006101603

  eISBN: 978-0-307-40550-0

  v3.0_r2

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1 The Hotel de la Plage

  2 Jersey Gaol

  3 Island at War

  4 Romainville

  5 Villa de la Bretonnière

  6 Dr. Graumann

  7 Codebreakers

  8 The Mosquito

  9 Under Unseen Eyes

  10 The Drop

  11 Martha’s Exciting Night

  12 Camp 020

  Photo Excerpt

  13 35 Crespigny Road

  14 What a Way Out

  15 Freda and Diane

  16 Abracadabra

  17 The Greater the Adventure

  18 Stowaway Spy

  19 Joli Albert

  20 Damp Squib

  Photo Excerpt

  21 The Ice Front

  22 The Girl at the Ritz

  23 Sabotage Consultant

  24 Lunch at the Lutétia

  25 The Prodigal Crook

  26 Doodlebugs

  27 Going to the Dogs

  28 Case Dismissed

  29 Aftermath

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Double Cross

  For Kate

  zigzag n : a pattern made up of many small corners at an acute angle, tracing a path between two parallel lines; it can be described as both jagged and fairly regular.

  It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus double agents are recruited and used.

  —SUN-TZU, The Art of War

  War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

  —GEORGE HERBERT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE TRUE STORY that follows is based on official papers, letters, diaries, newspaper reports, contemporary accounts, and memoirs.

  I was first alerted to the existence of the Englishman Eddie Chapman by his obituary in the Times of London. Among the lives of the great and good, here was a character who had achieved a certain greatness, but in ways that were far from conventionally good. The obituary was intriguing as much for what it did not say—and could not know—about Chapman’s exploits in the Second World War, since those details remained under seal in MI5’s secret archives. At that time, it seemed the full story of Eddie Chapman would never be told.

  But then, under a new policy of openness, MI5 began the selective release of hitherto classified information that could not embarrass the living or damage national security. The first “Zigzag files” were released to the UK National Archives in 2001. These declassified archives contain more than seventeen hundred pages of documents relating to Chapman’s case: transcripts of interrogations, detailed wireless intercepts, reports, descriptions, diagrams, internal memos, minutes, letters, and photographs. The files are extraordinarily detailed, describing not only events and people but also the minutiae of a spy’s life, his changing moods and feelings, his hopes, fears, and contradictions. Chapman’s diligent case officers set out to paint a complete picture of the man, with a meticulous (sometimes hour-by-hour) account of his actions. I am particularly grateful to MI5 for agreeing to my request to declassify additional files relating to the case, and to Howard Davies of the National Archives for helping to facilitate those supplementary releases.

  Eddie Chapman’s own memoirs were first published in 1954 under the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act. These, however, are partial, unreliable, and sometimes deliberately misleading; as Chapman’s MI5 handlers noted, he had no sense of chronology whatsoever. I have therefore accepted Chapman’s version of events only when his account can be corroborated by other sources. All quotations are cited in the endnotes, but for clarity I have standardized spelling and have selectively used reported speech as direct speech. Chapman’s story has also emerged from the memories of the living, people touched, directly or indirectly, by the individuals and events described, and I am grateful to the dozens of interviewees in Britain, France, Germany, and Norway—including Betty Chapman—who were willing to talk to me for so many hours, recalling a past now more than half a century old. For obvious reasons, some of those involved in the more clandestine areas of Chapman’s life have requested anonymity.

  Just weeks before this book was due to go to press, MI5 discovered an entire secret file, overlooked in previous transfers to the public archives, and generously provided me with full access to its contents. That file (which will now become available at the National Archives) gives extraordinary psychological insights into Chapman’s character, as seen by his case officers. It is, perhaps, the last missing piece in the Zigzag puzzle.

  Prologue

  2:13 A.M., DECEMBER 16, 1942

  A GERMAN SPY drops from a black Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane over Cambridgeshire. His silk parachute opens with a rustle, and for twelve minutes he floats silently down. The stars are out, but the land beneath his feet, swaddled in wartime blackout, is utterly dark. His nose bleeds copiously.

  The spy is well equipped. He wears British-issue army landing boots and helmet. In his pocket is a wallet taken from a British soldier killed at Dieppe four months earlier: inside are two identity cards, which are fake, and a letter from his girlfriend, Betty, which is genuine. His pack contains matches impregnated with quinine for “secret writing,” a wireless receiver, a military map, £990 in used notes of various denominations, a Colt revolver, an entrenching tool, and some plain-glass spectacles for disguise. Four of his teeth are made from new gold, paid for by Hitler’s Third Reich. Beneath his flying overalls he wears a civilian suit that was once of fashionable cut but is now somewhat worn. In the turnup of the right trouser leg has been sewn a small cellophane package containing a single suicide pill
of potassium cyanide.

  His name is Edward Arnold Chapman. The British police also know him as Edward Edwards, Edward Simpson, and Arnold Thompson. His German spymasters have given him the code name of Fritz or, affectionately, Fritzchen—“Little Fritz.” The British secret services, as yet, have no name for him. That evening the chief constable of Cambridgeshire, after an urgent call from a gentleman in Whitehall, has instructed all his officers to be on the lookout for an individual referred to only as “Agent X.”

  Eddie Chapman lands in a freshly ploughed field at 2:25 a.m., and immediately falls face-first into the sodden soil. Dazed, he releases his parachute, then climbs out of his blood-spattered flying suit and buries the bundle. He shoves the revolver into a pocket and digs into the pack for a map and a flashlight. The map has gone. He must have dropped it in the dark. On hands and knees, he searches. He curses and sits on the cold earth, in the deep darkness, and wonders where he is, who he is, and whose side he is on.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Hotel de la Plage

  SPRING CAME EARLY to the island of Jersey in 1939. The sun that poured through the dining-room window of the Hotel de la Plage formed a dazzling halo around the man sitting opposite Betty Farmer with his back to the sea, laughing as he tucked into the six-shilling Sunday Roast Special “with all the trimmings.”1 Betty, eighteen, a farm girl newly escaped from the Shropshire countryside, knew this man was quite unlike any she had met before.

  Beyond that, her knowledge of Eddie Chapman was somewhat limited. She knew that he was twenty-four years old, tall and handsome, with a thin mustache—just like Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade—and deep hazel eyes. His voice was strong but high-pitched with a hint of a Northern accent. He was “bubbly,” full of laughter and mischief. She knew he must be rich because he was “in the film business”2 and drove a Bentley. He wore expensive suits, a gold ring, and a cashmere overcoat with mink collar. Today he wore a natty yellow spotted tie and a sleeveless pullover. They had met at a club in Kensington Church Street, and although at first she had declined his invitation to dance, she soon relented. Eddie had become her first lover, but then he vanished, saying he had urgent business in Scotland. “I shall go,”3 he told her. “But I shall always come back.”

  Good as his word, Eddie had suddenly reappeared at the door of her lodgings, grinning and breathless. “How would you like to go4 to Jersey, then possibly to the south of France?” he asked. Betty had rushed off to pack.

  It was a surprise to discover they would be traveling with company. In the front seat of the waiting Bentley sat two men: the driver a huge, ugly brute with a crumpled face; the other small, thin, and dark. The pair did not seem ideal companions for a romantic holiday. The driver gunned the engine and they set off at thrilling speed through the London streets, screeching into the Croydon airport, parking behind the hangar, just in time to catch the Jersey Airways plane.

  That evening, they had checked into the seafront hotel. Eddie told the receptionist they were in Jersey to make a film. They had signed the register as Mr. and Mrs. Farmer of Torquay. After dinner, they moved on to West Park Pavilion, a nightclub on the pier, where they danced, played roulette, and drank some more. For Betty, it had been a day of unprecedented glamour and decadence.

  War was coming, everyone said so, but the dining room of the Hotel de la Plage was a place of pure peace that sunny Sunday. Beyond the golden beach, the waves flickered among a scatter of tiny islands, as Eddie and Betty ate trifle off plates with smart blue crests. Eddie was halfway through telling another funny story when he froze. A group of men in overcoats and brown hats had entered the restaurant and one was now in urgent conversation with the headwaiter. Before Betty could speak, Eddie stood up, bent down to kiss her once, and then jumped through the window, which was closed. There was a storm of broken glass, tumbling crockery, screaming women, and shouting waiters. Betty Farmer caught a last glimpse of Eddie Chapman sprinting off down the beach with two overcoated men in pursuit.

  There was much that Betty did not know about Eddie Chapman. He was married. Another woman was pregnant with his child. And he was a crook. Not some halfpenny bag snatcher, but a dedicated professional criminal, a “prince of the underworld,”5 in his own estimation.

  For Chapman, breaking the law was a vocation. In later years, when some sort of motive for his choice of career seemed to be called for, he claimed that the early death of his mother, in the TB ward of a pauper’s hospital, had sent him “off the rails”6 and turned him against society. Sometimes he blamed the grinding poverty and unemployment in northern England during the Depression for forcing him into a life of crime. But in truth, crime came naturally to him.

  Edward Chapman was born in Burnopfield, a tiny village in the Durham coalfields, on November 16, 1914, a few months into the First World War. His father, a marine engineer and too old to fight, had ended up running the Clippership, a dingy pub in Roker, and drinking a large portion of the stock. For Eddie, the eldest of three children, there was no money, not much love, little in the way of guidance, and only a cursory education. He soon developed a talent for misbehavior and a distaste for authority. Intelligent but lazy, insolent and easily bored, the young Chapman skipped school often, preferring to scour the beach for lemonade bottles, redeemable at a penny a piece, and then while away afternoons at the cinema in Sunderland.

  At the age of seventeen, after a brief and unsatisfactory stint as an unpaid apprentice at a Sunderland engineering firm, Chapman joined the army, although underage, and enlisted in the Second Battalion of the Coldstream Guards. Early in his training at Caterham, he slipped while playing handball and badly gashed his knee; the resulting scar would provide police with a useful distinguishing feature. The bearskin hat and smart red uniform made the girls gawp and giggle, but he found sentry duty outside the Tower of London tedious, and the city beyond beckoned.

  Chapman had worn a guardsman’s uniform for nine months when he was granted six days’ leave. He told the sergeant major that he was going home. Instead, in the company of an older guardsman, he wandered around Soho and the West End, hungrily eyeing the elegant women draped over the arms of men in sharp suits. In a café in Marble Arch, he noticed a pretty, dark-haired girl, and she spotted him. They danced at Smokey Joe’s in Soho. That night he lost his virginity. She persuaded him to stay another night; he stayed for two months, until they had spent all his pay. Chapman may have forgotten about the army, but the army had not forgotten about him. He was sure the dark-haired girl told the police. Chapman was arrested for going absent without leave, placed in the military prison in Aldershot—the “glasshouse”—and made to scrub out bedpans for eighty-four days. Release and a dishonorable discharge brought to an end his first prison sentence, and his last regular job. Chapman took a bus to London with £3 in his pocket, a fraying suit, and a “jail-crop haircut.”7 He headed straight for Soho.

  Soho in the 1930s was a notorious den of vice, and spectacular fun. This was the crossroads of London society, where the rich and feckless met the criminal and reckless, a place of seamy, raucous glamour. Chapman found work as a barman, then as a film extra, earning £3 for “three days doing crowd work”8 he worked as a masseur, a dancer, and eventually as an amateur boxer and wrestler. He was a fine wrestler, physically strong, and lithe as a cat, with a “wire and whipcord body.”9 This was a world of pimps and racecourse touts, pickpockets and con artists; late nights at Smokey Joe’s and early champagne breakfasts at Quaglino’s. “I mixed with all types10 of tricky people,” Chapman wrote later. “Racecourse crooks, thieves, prostitutes, and the flotsam of the night-life of a great city.” For the young Chapman, life in this seething, seedy enclave was thrilling. But it was also expensive. He acquired a taste for cognac and the gaming tables. Soon he was penniless.

  The thievery started in a small way: a forged check here, a snatched suitcase there, a little light burglary. His early crimes were unremarkable, the first faltering steps of an apprentice.

&
nbsp; In January 1935, he was caught in the back garden of a house in Mayfair, and fined £10. A month later, he was found guilty of stealing a check and obtaining credit by fraud. This time the court was less lenient, and Chapman was given two months’ hard labor in Wormwood Scrubs. A few weeks after his release, he was back inside, this time in Wandsworth Prison on a three-month sentence for trespassing and attempted housebreaking.

  Chapman branched out into crimes of a more lurid nature. Early in 1936, he was found guilty of “behaving in a manner11 likely to offend the public” in Hyde Park. Exactly how he was likely to have offended the public was not specified, but he was almost certainly discovered in flagrante delicto with a prostitute. He was fined £4 and made to pay a fee of 15 shillings 9 pence to the doctor who examined him for venereal disease. Two weeks later, he was charged with fraud after he tried to evade payment of a hotel bill.

  One contemporary remembers a young man “with good looks,12 a quick brain, high spirits and something desperate in him which made him attractive to men and dangerous to women.” Desperation may have led him to use the attraction of men for profit, for he once hinted at an early homosexual encounter. Women seemed to find him irresistible. According to one account, he made money by seducing “women on the fringes13 of society,” blackmailing them with compromising photographs taken by an accomplice and then threatening to show them to their husbands. It was even said that having “infected a girl of 1814 with VD, he blackmailed her by threatening to tell her parents that she had given it to him.”

  Chapman was on a predictable downward spiral of petty crime, prostitution, blackmail, and lengthening prison terms—punctuated by episodes of wild extravagance in Soho—when a scientific breakthrough in the criminal world abruptly altered his fortunes.

  In the early 1930s, British crooks discovered the high explosive gelignite. At about the same time, during one of his stints inside, Chapman discovered James Wells Hunt—the “best cracksman15 in London”—a “cool, self-possessed,16 determined character” who had perfected a technique for taking apart safes by drilling a hole in the lock and inserting a “French letter” stuffed with gelignite and water. Jimmy Hunt and Chapman went into partnership and were soon joined by Antony Latt, alias Darrington, alias “Darry,” a nerveless half-Burmese burglar whose father, he claimed, had been a native judge. A young felon named Hugh Anson was recruited to drive their getaway car.