Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  At Gare Montparnasse, the duo transferred to a reserved first-class compartment on the train for Nantes. In the dining car, Chapman gorged himself. The ascetic-looking Thomas ate little. Chapman finished his supper for him.

  It was evening when the train pulled into Nantes, France’s western port where the great Loire flows toward the Atlantic. A burly young man in civilian clothes with an impressively broken nose was waiting on the platform. He introduced himself as “Leo,” picked up Oberleutnant Thomas’s suitcase and Chapman’s bag of belongings, and led the way to where a large Mercedes awaited them.

  Chapman sank into the leather upholstery as Leo drove the car at high speeds through Nantes’s winding cobbled streets and then out into open countryside, heading northwest, past neat farms and meadows dotted with Limousin cows. At a roadside village café, a handful of peasants watched expressionless as the Mercedes sped past. After some seven kilometers, Leo slowed and turned right. They passed what appeared to be a factory and crossed over a railway bridge, before coming to a stop in front of a pair of green iron gates with a high wall on either side. A thick screen of poplar trees shielded from view whatever was behind the wall. Leo hailed the uniformed sentry, who unlocked the gates.

  Down a short drive, the car came to rest before a large stone mansion. Chapman was led inside and upstairs to a book-lined study. Here a familiar figure in a three-piece pin-striped suit sat hunched writing over a desk. “Welcome to the Villa22 de la Bretonnière,” said Dr. Graumann, rising to shake Chapman’s hand. “Come and have a glass of really good brandy.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Villa de la Bretonnière

  AFTER ROMAINVILLE, the Villa de la Bretonnière was paradise. The three-story building had been built in the 1830s, the same decade as the Paris prison, but it could not have been more of a contrast. It was what the French describe as a maison de maître: larger than a mansion, but smaller than a château. It boasted all the appurtenances of a rich man’s retreat: oak floors, huge marble fireplaces, crystal chandeliers, and double doors opening onto a large and well-tended garden. The house had belonged to a wealthy Jew, a cinema owner in Nantes, before it was requisitioned and its owner “relocated.” The building, surrounded by trees and a high wall, suited Nazi intelligence purposes exactly.

  That evening, elated by the brandy and Graumann’s welcome, Chapman was shown to a room on the top floor. For the first time in four years, the door was not locked behind him. He slept in crisp linen sheets, and woke to the sound of a cock crowing. Chapman thought he had never seen anywhere so beautiful. To the west, the land sloped gently through woodland and fields to the Erdre River. Waterfowl splashed in an ornamental pond, while a litter of Alsatian puppies played on the lawn.

  Chapman was escorted to breakfast by Oberleutnant Thomas. In the dining room, Graumann sat at the head of the table, reading a copy of the Times and eating a boiled egg. He nodded to Chapman but did not speak. (The aristocrat, Chapman would soon learn, did not hold with conversation during breakfast.) Around the table, half a dozen men were tucking into a feast of toast, eggs, butter, honey, and fresh coffee, all served on the former owner’s best china. Chapman recognized Leo, the chauffeur with the flattened nose, who grinned back through broken teeth.

  A French maidservant cleared away breakfast, cigarettes were offered around, and Thomas introduced the other members of the household. Each man, though Chapman could not know it, proffered a false name. A ruddy-faced, well-built fellow with a pearl tiepin was presented as “Hermann Wojch.” He was followed by “Robert Keller,” a slight, blond man in his early twenties, alongside “Albert,” a balding, middle-aged man with a cheery countenance. To Chapman’s astonishment, the next person to step forward, wearing plus fours and a gold wristwatch, greeted him in English with a broad Cockney accent. He gave his name as “Franz Schmidt.”

  Later, upstairs in the study, Graumann adopted his habitual posture, with one finger hooked in his waistcoat, and explained that Chapman was now part of the Abwehr—the German foreign intelligence gathering and espionage service—and that he was attached to the Nantes section, “one of the most important1 sabotage training centers of the German Secret Service in Europe.”

  For the next three months, Graumann continued, Chapman would undergo rigorous training, under his direction: Keller would be his wireless instructor; Wojch and Schmidt would teach him sabotage and espionage techniques; Leo would show him how to jump with a parachute. If he passed certain tests, he would be sent to Britain on a mission; and, if successful, he would be handsomely rewarded. There was no word as to what would happen if Chapman failed these tests.

  Meanwhile, he was free to explore the grounds of La Bretonnière, but Thomas would accompany him at all times. He should avoid fraternizing with the locals, and under no circumstances should he bring women back to the house. In the presence of French people, he must speak only German, and if any Germans quizzed him, he should explain that he was German by birth but had lived most of his life in America. Officially, he was now part of the Baustelle Kerstang, a military engineering unit repairing roads and buildings in occupied France.

  Chapman would need a spy name, Graumann declared, to protect his real identity. What was the name that the English routinely attached to Germans? Fritz? This, he chuckled, would be the code name for the new Abwehr spy number V-6523.

  As he struggled to take in the flood of information, Chapman reflected that Dr. Graumann, with his pin-striped suit, looked more like a “respectable business man”2 than a spymaster. His tone was brisk but benign, and his eyes under heavy lids twinkled. Each time he spoke, his head jerked slightly, back and forth. His voice struck Chapman as being “surprisingly soft,3 for a German,” but the tone hardened very slightly when the doctor remarked: “Look, you will see4 a good many things, but you must realise that with our section things must be kept secret. I’m asking you not to be too nosey.”

  For months, the Abwehr had been searching for an Englishman who could be trained as a spy and saboteur and dropped into Britain. The man must be without scruple, adept at concealment, intelligent, ruthless, and mercenary. Chapman’s arrival at La Bretonnière was not some accident of fate. Rather, he represented the latest, boldest stroke in a war between the secret services of Britain and Germany that had raged, unseen but unceasing, for the previous two years.

  Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Abwehr (literally meaning “defense”) was reputed to be the most efficient intelligence service in Europe. An early appraisal by MI5, the security service controlling counterespionage in the United Kingdom and throughout the British Empire, described the Abwehr as an “absolutely first-class5 organisation in training and personnel.” This assessment was overly flattering. One of the most striking aspects of the countries’ intelligence services was just how little each side knew about the other. In 1939, SIS, the British Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6, and operating in all areas outside British territory) did not know what the German military intelligence service was called, or even who ran it. In a frank self-assessment written after the end of the Second World War, MI5 conceded that “by the time of the fall6 of France the organisation of the Security Service as a whole was in a state which can only be described as chaotic…attempting to evolve means of detecting German agents without any inside knowledge of the German organisation.”

  The Abwehr was equally ill prepared. Hitler had neither expected nor wanted to go to war with Britain, and most Nazi intelligence operations had been directed eastwards. The Abwehr intelligence network in Britain was virtually nonexistent. As Britain and Germany squared up for conflict, a strange shadow dance took place between their rival intelligence services: both frantically began building up spy networks, almost from scratch, for immediate deployment against one another. Each credited the other with extreme efficiency and advanced preparations, and both were wrong.

  The first serious skirmish took place over a diminutive, dubious, and aggravating Welsh electrician call
ed Arthur Owens. A manufacturer of battery accumulators, Owens had made frequent business trips to Germany in the 1930s, bringing back small items of technical and military information that he passed on to the Admiralty. In 1936, he was formally enrolled in British intelligence as Agent Snow (a partial anagram of Owens). At the same time, however, Owens had secretly made contact with the Abwehr. MI6 intercepted his mail, but when confronted with evidence of his double game, Owens insisted he was working for British interests. MI6 accepted his explanation, for the time being. On instructions from Germany, Owens picked up a wireless transmitter from the left-luggage office at Victoria Station, providing valuable technical information on German radio construction. Then he vanished to Hamburg, and it was assumed he had “gone bad.”

  The day after Britain declared war on Germany, the Welshman resurfaced and telephoned Special Branch to arrange a meeting. At Wandsworth Prison, Owens was offered the choice between execution and working as a double agent; once again, he pledged loyalty to Britain. In September 1939, he traveled to Holland, this time accompanied by a retired police inspector, Gwilym Williams, posing as a Welsh nationalist eager to throw off the English yoke. There they met up with Abwehr officer Nikolaus Ritter, and returned to London with valuable information, including the keys to various Abwehr radio codes.

  The British still had doubts about Agent Snow, and these deepened after an extraordinary series of events in the North Sea. Ritter had asked Owens to recruit another agent for training in Germany, and agreed to send a submarine to pick them up in the North Sea south of Dogger Bank. MI6, obviously eager to plant a double agent within the Abwehr, duly located a reformed con man and thief called Sam McCarthy, who agreed to play the part. As they motored to the rendezvous in a trawler, McCarthy and Owens each became convinced that the other was, in fact, a German spy. Two days before the meeting, McCarthy locked Owens in his cabin, and they steamed home. When Owens was searched, he was found to be carrying a report describing the operations of the British intelligence services. This was traced to a Piccadilly restaurant manager and sometime MI5 informer called William Rolph. Confronted with the evidence, Rolph admitted he had been recruited by Owens to spy for Germany. As soon as the interrogators had left, he committed suicide by putting his head in a gas oven.

  Owens spent the rest of the war in prison, and to this day it is uncertain whether he was a patriot, a traitor, or both. But the Snow case had shown the extraordinary value of running a double agent, and had furnished some vital technical and cryptological clues. The farce in the North Sea demonstrated that the Abwehr was looking to recruit disaffected British citizens, even criminals, as German agents.

  In Britain, mounting fears of a German invasion prompted a spy scare of epidemic proportions. The collapse of one European country after another before the Nazi blitzkrieg could only have one explanation: In each country, there must have been a network of German agents behind the lines, aiding the German advance. A similar network, it was assumed, must exist in Britain, plotting to undermine the state, perhaps with the help of pro-appeasement elements within the establishment. The myth of the German fifth column was borne on a most un-British wave of public hysteria, stoked by the press and politicians. “There is a well-defined7 class of people prone to spy mania,” wrote Churchill, who was not immune to the mania himself. “War is the heyday of these worthy folk.”

  German spies were spotted everywhere, and nowhere. Police were deluged with reports of strange figures in disguise, lights flashing at night, burning haystacks, and paranoid neighbors hearing tapping through the walls. One avid amateur spy catcher reported seeing a man with a “typically Prussian neck.”8 Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked. Anyone and everyone might be a spy. Evelyn Waugh lampooned the frenzy: “Suspect everyone9—the vicar, the village grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here for a hundred years, all the most unlikely people.” The spies were said to be spreading newspaper on the ground to give secret signals to airborne Germans, poisoning chocolate, infiltrating the police, recruiting lunatics from asylums to act in a suicide squad, and sending out murderous agents into the British countryside disguised as female hitchhikers.

  Vast energy and resources was devoted to following up the reports, with a complete lack of success. The most grievous outcome of the panic was the internment of twenty-seven thousand Germans, Italians, and other “enemy aliens,” most of whom were not only innocent, but also strongly opposed to Nazism. The failure to uncover the plotters merely redoubled the conviction that they must be agents of the highest quality. The secret service, wrote an insider, “was left with the10 very uncomfortable feeling that there must be agents in this country whom it was unable to discover.”

  The simple truth was that apart from Arthur Owens and his band of imaginary Welsh extremists, the Abwehr had utterly failed to recruit an effective team of spies in Britain before the war. But as Operation Sea Lion, the plan for the German invasion of Britain, took shape, the German secret service set about rectifying this failure with a vengeance. From late 1940, as the air duel between the RAF and the Luftwaffe intensified, the Abwehr began pouring agents into Britain: They came by rubber dinghy, U-boat, seaplane, and parachute; they came disguised as refugees and seamen. Some came armed with the latest wireless transmitters and carefully forged identity documents; others arrived with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. Between September and November 1940, it is estimated that at least twenty-one Abwehr agents were dispatched to Britain, with instructions to report on troop movements, identify and sabotage targets vital to British defense, prepare for the imminent invasion, and then mingle with the retreating British army. A list of prominent Britons to be arrested by the Gestapo was drawn up, and at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin there was little doubt that Hitler’s storm troopers would soon be marching down Whitehall.

  The Abwehr spies were a mixed bag. Some were Nazi ideologues, but most were the human jetsam that tends to float toward the spy world: opportunists, criminals, and a handful of fantasists. The vast majority of the “invasion spies” had one thing in common, though: They were amateurs. Many spoke English badly, or not at all. Few had received more than rudimentary training. They were poorly briefed and often ignorant of English life. One was arrested after he tried to pay £10 and 6 shillings for a train ticket costing “ten and six.”

  The Abwehr would never find out that its entire espionage program in Britain had been discovered, dismantled, and turned against it. Many of its agents, it is true, seemed to vanish without a trace, but this was only to be expected. Several had begun sending messages by wireless and secret ink, and a few seemed to be flourishing undercover. That, at least, is what Hitler was told. Yet the more professional and experienced German intelligence officers knew that the caliber of spies being sent to Britain was pitifully low. The little information coming out of Britain was low-grade stuff. No sabotage operation of any note had been carried out.

  The Abwehr leadership decided that in order to penetrate Britain’s intelligence defenses, they would need to look beyond the eager amateurs deployed so far. An altogether superior sort of spy was needed: someone handpicked and properly trained by professionals for a specific, highly dangerous mission. This individual should be dedicated, ruthless, and, if possible, British. For this purpose, in March 1942, the Nantes section (or Dienststelle) of the Abwehr was established as an elite espionage training center. A Rittmeister who was also a rising star within the Abwehr was appointed to run the new spy school, and provided with money, expert trainers, staff, and a spacious mansion just outside the city in the little village of Saint-Joseph. The unit would be answerable to the Abwehr headquarters in Paris, but largely independent.

  A young English-speaking Abwehr officer named Walter Praetorius had been appointed to find a renegade Englishman worthy of training as a top-class spy. Praetorius was a committed Nazi in his politics, but a confirmed Anglophile in his tastes. His maternal gre
at-grandfather, Henry Thoms, had been a Scottish flax merchant who emigrated from Dundee to the Baltic port of Riga, and married a German woman. Praetorius was fiercely proud of his British blood, and liked to remind anyone who would listen that he was a scion of the “Chiefly line of Clan11 McThomas.”

  The young Praetorius had graduated from Berlin University. In 1933, at age twenty-two, he spent a year at Southampton University improving his English as part of an Anglo-German student-exchange scheme. He intended to become a teacher. In England, Praetorius played the flute, rowed for the university, and began to sport the clothes and airs of an English gentleman. But above all, he danced. The most lasting legacy from his year in Britain was an unlikely but intense passion for English country dancing. He learned the reels and sword dances of his Scottish ancestors, but he fell in love with morris dancing. The English tend to mock morris dancing, but Praetorius found the dancers with their odd hats and peculiar rituals quite captivating. During summer vacation, he cycled around England, photographing folk dances and analyzing the dance steps. After months of careful study, he pronounced that morris dancing was the root of all dancing in the world, and therefore a foundation of world culture (a remarkable theory never proposed by anyone else, before or since).