Ben Macintyre - Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Traitor, Hero, Spy

AGENT ZIGZAG

The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman:

Lover, Traitor, Hero, Spy

Ben Macintyre

CONTENTS

Zigzag. n, adj, adv and vb: '... 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

2.13 a.m., 16 December 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 turn-up of the right trouser leg has been sewn a small cellophane package containing a single suicide pill of potassium cyanide.

The name of the spy 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 codename 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 torch. 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.

Spring came early to the island of Jersey in 1939, and 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'. 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 moustache just like Errol Flynn in TheCharge of the Light Brigade and deep hazel eyes. His voice was strong but high-pitched with a hint of a north-eastern accent. He was 'bubbly', full of laughter and mischief She knew he must be rich because he was 'in the film business' 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,' 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 go 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 travelling 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 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 half way 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 head waiter. 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.

Here are just some of the things 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', 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' 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 16 November 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 misbehaviour, and a distaste of 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: The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Alfred Hitchcock films Blackmail and spy drama The Man Mo Knew Too Much.