Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  “Is that your real name?” asked Vail. The man just “shook his head and smiled.”

  While the constables went to find his parachute, the man became “extremely talkative,” boasting about the senior German officers he knew and declaring, apropos of nothing at all, that the only way to invade Europe was from Africa via Italy. Vail wondered if he might be “dazed” from his descent. The man smelled slightly of celery.

  The exotic visitor and his police escort departed in the police car. George said he was going back to bed; there was work to do tomorrow. But Martha sat in the kitchen as dawn came up, thinking about the strange events of the last few hours. Later that morning, while doing the dusting, she found a British army reconnaissance map down the back of the sofa, which must have fallen out of the man’s pocket. When she spread it out on the kitchen table, she saw that Mundford was circled in red crayon. The man had been “very polite,”12 Martha Convine thought, and underneath all that mud and blood he was probably rather handsome. She could not wait to tell her neighbor, but knew she could not. Sergeant Vail had said they must not breathe a word of what had happened to anyone, which was also thrilling.

  At police divisional headquarters Chapman was stripped, body-searched, issued with a new set of clothing, and brought before the deputy chief constable, who shook his hand in a friendly manner. Chapman was wary; he did not like being inside a police station, and he was not in the habit of telling the truth to policemen. His answers were cagey.

  “Name?”

  “George Clarke will do,13 for now.”

  “Trade or profession?”

  “Well, put me down as independent.”

  The chief constable picked up the canvas bag containing the radio. “That should not be opened except by the Intelligence Service,” Chapman snapped.

  The brown pill had been found in the turnup. Did he have any more? “They had better have a look.”

  Chapman gave a most selective account of his story, starting in Jersey and ending with the “very terrifying experience” of being suspended upside down from a German plane.

  Why had had he gone to the Channel Islands? “For a holiday.”

  Why was he imprisoned in Romainville? “For political reasons.”

  Then he clammed up. “I have had a rough passage,” he said. “I need to speak to the British secret services, when I will have a very interesting story to tell.”

  The secret services were just as keen to hear Fritz’s story. Two men in civilian clothes arrived in a Black Maria. Papers were signed, and Chapman was driven through the morning traffic to London and the Royal Patriotic School in Wandsworth, where he was formally detained under Article 1A of the Arrival from Enemy Territory Order. Then he was loaded back into the car. He did not know, and hardly cared, where he was going. The excitement, fear, and exhaustion of the previous twenty-four hours had drained him. He barely noticed the sandbagged doorways of the city at war, or the scorched gaps where buildings had been destroyed by the Blitz. After half an hour, they turned through a gate in a high wooden fence, topped by double rolls of barbed wire, and drew up in front of large and ugly Victorian mansion.

  Two men in gym shoes led Chapman to a room in the basement, with a bench and two blankets, and locked him inside. A man with a monocle opened the door, peered hawkishly at him, said nothing, and then went away. He was stripped again, and ordered to put on flannel prison trousers and a coat, with a six-inch white diamond shape sewn on the back. A doctor appeared and ordered him to open his mouth. The medic spent several minutes probing and tapping at his teeth, particularly the new dental work. Then he tested Chapman’s heart, listened to his lungs, and declared him to be in the peak of condition, though “mentally and physically spent.”14 A man with a camera arrived and took photographs from the front and in profile.

  Chapman fought to keep his head up. With a supreme effort, he stared into the lens. The face in the picture is drained by fatigue and stress. There is caked mud in the tangled hair, and a trace of dried blood in the moustache. But there is something else in the face. Behind the drooping eyelids and stubble lies the very faint trace of a smile.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Camp 020

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL ROBIN “Tin Eye” Stephens, the commander of Camp 020, Britain’s secret interrogation center for captured enemy spies, had a very specialized skill: He broke people. He crushed them, psychologically, into very small pieces and then, if he thought it worthwhile, he would put them back together again. He considered this to be an art, and not one that could be learned. “A breaker is born1 and not made,” he said. “There must be certain inherent qualities: an implacable hatred of the enemy, a certain aggressive approach, a disinclination to believe, and above all a relentless determination to break down the spy, however hopeless the odds, however many the difficulties, however long the process may take.” Stephens had ways of making people talk, but they were not the brutal, obvious ways of the Gestapo. Behind the tin eye was an instinctive and inspired amateur psychologist.

  Born in Egypt in 1900, Stephens had joined the Gurkhas, the legendarily tough Nepalese troops, before moving to the security service in 1939. He spoke Urdu, Arabic, Somali, Amharic, French, German, and Italian. This multilingualism should not be taken to indicate that Stephens was broad-minded about other races and nations. He was ragingly xenophobic, and given to making remarks such as “Italy is a country2 populated by undersized, posturing folk.” He disliked “weeping and romantic3 fat Belgians,” “shifty Polish Jews,”4 and “unintelligent”5 Icelanders. He also detested homosexuals. Above all, he hated Germans.

  In 1940, the government set up a permanent center for the interrogation and imprisonment of suspected spies, subversives, and enemy aliens in Latchmere House, a large and gloomy Victorian house near Ham Common in West London. Latchmere House had been a military hospital in the First World War, specializing in the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. In Stephens’s words, it had “lunatic cells ready6 made for a prison.” Secluded, forbidding, and surrounded by multiple barbed-wire fences, the interrogation center was code-named Camp 020. Colonel Stephens, extroverted and short-tempered, terrified his underlings almost as much as the prisoners. He never removed his monocle (he was said to sleep in it), and though everyone called him “Tin Eye” as a consequence, very few dared do so to his face. But there was another side to this bristling martinet. He was a superb judge of character and situation; he never lost his temper with a prisoner, and he condemned the use of violence or torture as barbaric and counterproductive. Anyone who resorted to the third degree was immediately banned from Camp 020.

  Away from the interrogation cells, Tin Eye could be charming and very funny. He was a frustrated writer, as can be seen from his reports, which have a delightful literary flourish; some of his more extreme statements of prejudice were simply intended to shock or amuse. He thought of himself as a master of the interrogative arts. Some of his colleagues thought he was quite mad. What few disputed was that he was outstanding at his job: establishing the guilt of the enemy spy, breaking down his resistance, extracting vital information, scaring him witless, winning his trust, and then, finally, turning him over to Tar Robertson for use as a double agent. No one could turn a spy like Tin Eye.

  At 9:30 a.m. on the morning of December 17, Eddie Chapman found himself in Interrogation Room 3 of Camp 020, facing this strange, angry-looking man with the uniform of a Gurkha and the eye of a basilisk. Stephens was flanked by two other officers, Captains Short and Goodacre. The three officers made a grim and forbidding tribunal. That was part of Tin Eye’s technique. “No chivalry.7 No gossip. No cigarettes…a spy in war should be at the point of the bayonet. It is a question8 of atmosphere. The room is like a court and he is made to stand up and answer questions as before a judge.”

  The room was bugged. In another part of Camp 020, a stenographer recorded every word. “Your name is Chapman,9 is it?” barked Tin Eye.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “I am not saying thi
s in any sense of a threat, but you are here in a British Secret Service prison at the present time and it’s our job in wartime to see that we get your whole story from you. Do you see?”

  The threat didn’t need to be made. Chapman told him everything, in a great tumbling torrent of confession. He told Stephens about his dismissal from the Coldstream Guards, his criminal past, his time in Jersey prison, the months in Romainville, his recruitment, his training in Nantes and Berlin, and the parachute drop. He told him about the codes he knew, the sabotage techniques he had learned, the secret writing, the passwords, the code words, and the wireless frequencies. He told him about Graumann and Thomas, Wojch and Schmidt, and the ugly man from Angers with the gold teeth. He explained how he had gathered information, and then destroyed it at the last moment.

  When Chapman began to describe his decision to take up full-time crime, the interrogation veered close to farce.

  “Well, then it gets rather difficult, Sir. I started running around with a mob of gangsters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t say exactly how I drifted in.”

  “What made you turn over to these curious people?”

  “It’s rather difficult to say.”

  When he described his mission to blow up the machine room of the De Havilland aircraft factory, Stephens interrupted.

  “Pretty hazardous undertaking, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were rather a favorite. Did they trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  “They said they thought rather highly of you, that you could get in anywhere and do virtually anything?”

  “Yes, I could.”

  Stephens turned the discussion to the contents of Chapman’s kit bag. He pointed out that the cash had come wrapped in bands that immediately identified it as German, and “would have cost him his neck” when they were spotted.

  “The man who was supposed to search you, proceeds to identify your currency with a German label?” asked Stephens, incredulously.

  “That’s the fault of Thomas,” said Chapman, equally astonished. “In the excitement he probably forgot to take it off.”

  Stephens made a note. The process of distancing Chapman from his German handlers, by undermining his faith in their efficiency, had begun. So when Chapman recalled the conversation with von Gröning, in which the older man had laughingly said that Chapman would never dare betray them because the British police would lock him up, Stephens again interjected. “That was plain, unvarnished blackmail,”10 he said, in mock outrage, and was delighted when Chapman, “with some bitterness,11 said he felt that all along.”

  After two hours of interrogation, Stephens left Chapman in the company of Captain Short, a rotund, owlish figure who was as cheery as his boss was menacing. Today this technique would be called “good cop–bad cop” in his secret guide to interrogation techniques, Stephens called it “blow hot–blow cold.”12

  “They treated you pretty well,13 didn’t they?” said Short, in a sympathetic tone.

  “Yes, I had a very good time there.”

  “Particularly after having been in prison in Jersey and the other concentration camp.”

  “How long have I to remain in this one? I mean, I’ve taken quite a lot of risks getting information which I thought would be of value, and [it is] valuable I think.”

  Stephens had Chapman exactly where he wanted him. The spy seemed keen to tell all, with apparent honesty. He wanted to tell more. He wanted to please his captors. And he wanted to get out of prison.

  In his office, Stephens took a telephone call from the policeman who had accompanied Chapman back to London: “I don’t know what14 this man may tell you, Sir. He came with a German parachute, but I recognised him at once—he was in my platoon some years ago.” By an odd coincidence, the two men had been in the Coldstream Guards together, and the policeman now related how Chapman had gone AWOL and was then cashiered. The information tallied precisely with the story Chapman had told. So far, then, he was telling the truth.

  The interrogators began to turn up the heat. Chapman was allowed a break, and some food, but then they were back, probing, deliberately misrepresenting what he had already said, worrying away at any fissures in his story to find out if he was lying or holding something back. In Stephens’s mind, “No spy, however astute,15 is proof against relentless interrogation.” The MI5 officers worked in shifts, late into the night. “Physically and mentally16 it will wear down the strongest constitution in the end,” Stephens predicted.

  The information continued to pour out of Chapman: In the course of forty-eight hours he gave more than fifty descriptions of separate individuals, from Graumann the spymaster to Odette the cook. Chapman described things of vital importance and utter triviality; he described the flak emplacements at Nantes, the location of the Paris Abwehr headquarters, his part in the occupation of Vichy, France, and the price of black-market butter. He described the Breton nationalists, the treacherous Gaullists, and the sundry other dodgy characters that had passed through Nantes. He told them some things they knew, such as the wireless codes they had already broken, which allowed them to test Chapman’s truthfulness; but he also told them much that was new, and priceless, creating an astonishingly detailed picture of German espionage methods. He seemed not only eager to impart information, but also offered suggestions as to how it might be used. Surely, said Chapman, by acting on this intelligence, Britain could break the Abwehr code and intercept messages between the various units.

  The interrogators offered a vague response, but inside they rejoiced, for Chapman’s suggestion showed that the Most Secret Sources were still intact: “It is quite clear17 from his remarks that he has not the slightest idea that we have been breaking the messages which have passed between these stations during the last few months,” wrote the interrogators. It swiftly became apparent that Chapman would not have to be cajoled into acting as a double agent for Britain, but was itching to get to work. One motive for his willingness became clear when he described what had happened to Tony Faramus.

  “He is a hostage18 for my good behavior,” explained Chapman.

  “For your good behavior in France, or here?”

  “Here. The idea was to use him as a kind of lever to make me do my work here.” If Chapman could convince his German masters that he was doing their bidding, then, he explained, his friend’s life might yet be saved. Stephens made another note.

  While Chapman’s memory was scoured for valuable information, his luggage was simultaneously being searched for clues. The matches for secret writing and the evil-looking brown pill were sent for scientific analysis; the banknotes were individually examined, their serial numbers noted, to try to establish where they had come from; the fake identity cards were subjected to ultraviolet-light scanning by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, their precise chemical composition and typography analyzed and compared to the genuine article; the wireless was sent to the Special Operations Executive (responsible for sabotage and espionage behind enemy lines) to find out if it had come from a British agent operating in France, and if so, which one. Chapman was quizzed about every item in his wallet. He explained that only one was really his own: “That was a private letter19 written by a girlfriend to me—a girlfriend of mine before the war—I brought that back with me.”

  Chapman’s every statement was compared to the evidence in the Most Secret Sources, to try to catch him in a lie. When Chapman’s chronology was erroneous, as it frequently was, they would go over the times and dates again and again, until satisfied that any errors were “natural inexactitudes,”20 not deliberate distortions. Scotland Yard was asked to provide details of his criminal record, to check out his extravagant claims of villainy; when the record arrived, it was found that many of the crimes Chapman had admitted to were not on it.

  Stephens later claimed that Chapman had also “confessed to an experiment21 in sodomy” during his Soho years. It is hard to know what to make of this: there is n
o trace of this confession in the interrogation transcripts. Tin Eye, moreover, was an extreme homophobe, and prided himself on his ability to identify and expose experimental sodomites. Chapman may have had a homosexual affair earlier in his youth, but it is certain that he had been heterosexual, to an almost pathological degree, for many years. By way of recommendation, Stephens noted approvingly: “Today there is no trace22 of sodomy and gone is any predilection for living on women on the fringes of society.”

  With the evidence Chapman was providing, British intelligence was swiftly building up a picture of the entire Abwehr system in France. The German secret service had been so certain of its unbreakable code that the personnel at the various units often used their own names in wireless correspondence. That information was now merged with Chapman’s descriptions, allowing them to identify the different players in the organization. Chapman would have been astonished.

  British intelligence had long ago established that the head and deputy head of the Nantes Abwehr section were Rittmeister Stephan von Gröning and Oberleutnant Walter Praetorius. But the man Chapman knew as “Wojch” was really Feldwebel Horst Barton, while “Schmidt” was Franz Stötzner, both suspected saboteurs who had come to England before the war to work as waiters sponsored by an association of British restaurateurs and hoteliers. “Leo” was a known German criminal named Leo Kreusch, and “Albert” a former traveling salesman named Albert Schael. The Gestapo officer from Angers who had tried to recruit Chapman was probably Dernbach, “one of the principal23 counter-espionage agents in France.” Piece by piece, they began to put faces to names; even the pilot of the Focke-Wulf and the beautiful translator at Romainville were identified. Tar Robertson was impressed at the way Chapman had been kept in the dark over the identities of his German comrades: “On no occasion24 has anyone’s real name become apparent to him,” he wrote. When one of the interrogators casually dropped the name “von Gröning” into the conversation, Chapman’s failure to react proved he had never heard it before.