Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Freda and Diane

  WHERE WAS FREDA? Chapman’s inquiries were persistent. What had been a request was now a demand. He was petulant and becoming confrontational. One night, he confided to Backwell that the care of Freda and Diane was the only thing that now mattered to him. He must make amends. The policeman reported: “He wants to provide1 for the [child] in whom, he has said, his one interest lies.” He even spoke of taking custody of Diane, if Freda was in difficulty, but conceded that this was “impossible”2 in the current circumstances. He asked Tooth, in the event of his death, to give Diane the complete works of H. G. Wells on her sixteenth birthday. But at the same time he wondered if it would be better for his daughter never to “know of his existence,3 [since] he would only handicap her and cause her pain and trouble.”

  “Personal matters4 occupy a great deal of his attention,” Backwell reported. If killing Hitler was one self-appointed mission for Chapman, then caring for Freda and Diane was the other.

  One night, he lost his temper and scribbled a furious note to Tar Robertson: “My sources of information5 have practically run dry. I can be of no further service here, and for many, many personal reasons I don’t wish to stay here one day longer.” Backwell passed on the letter, with an accompanying note: “He feels his present position6 is intolerable, being in the country again, and yet unable to see old acquaintances and do as he pleases…E is essentially a man of action who cannot by nature follow a stereotypical form of living.” Backwell was convinced that only a meeting with his former lover and their daughter would put Chapman back into a reasonable frame of mind. “The question of Freda7 always seems to be at the back of his mind,” he wrote. “The arrangement of a meeting with Freda would almost completely solve his problems.”

  Reed was doubtful. There was no telling how Freda might react to a reunion. The security risk was too great, since “if she bore any malice8 and realised Zigzag was back in the country she would probably go to the police and cause an embarrassing situation.” Even if a reunion went well, Freda would somehow have to be incorporated into Chapman’s cover story, possibly putting her and the child at risk. He told Chapman that the police were still trying to trace Freda while the “authorities” considered his request. Chapman reacted badly. He became even more “truculent and moody,”9 and took to his bed. Reed was now alarmed. Chapman plainly believed MI5 had already found Freda, but was deliberately keeping them apart. And he was right.

  Police had tracked down Freda Elsie Louise Stevenson almost immediately, because for some years Freda had been trying to find Eddie Chapman “in connection with an application for a maintenance allowance.” She was now living with her daughter in a boardinghouse at 17 Cossington Road, Westcliffe-on-Sea, Essex.

  Freda’s life had grown steadily bleaker in the years since Chapman left her at the age of nineteen. She had been living in the flat in Shepherd’s Bush when he vanished in 1939, a few weeks before she discovered she was pregnant with Diane. She had tried to find Eddie, first through a parade of Soho barmen, then by asking around his criminal associates, and finally by going to the police. This was how she learned that he was in Jersey, in prison. She sent letters and photographs. There was never any reply. Then came the invasion, and there was no longer any point in writing. A rumor went around the London underworld that Chapman had been shot by the Germans while trying to escape from Jersey.

  Freda moved on. She had trained as a dancer, but when war started there was less and less dancing to be done. She moved to Southend, to be near her mother. A pale, frail creature, with large brown eyes and a small, downturned mouth, she was trusting and gentle by nature; but also astonishingly resilient, and a ferociously protective mother. Her father, a bus driver, had died before she was born, so she, too, had been raised fatherless. She did not ask, or expect, much from life, and with what little life gave her, she made do. In August 1941, she had met and married a much older man called Keith Butchart, the manager of a balloon works. The marriage foundered almost immediately. One night, when Butchart was out drinking, Freda gathered up little Diane, burned her new husband’s suit in the fire, and moved out.

  She was working part-time as a firewoman when the two officers from Special Branch caught up with her. In the front parlor of the boardinghouse, they asked her lots of questions about Eddie Chapman. When they went away, Freda hugged Diane, and felt a small glimmering of hope.

  Back at Crespigny Road, Tooth and Backwell found that their role had expanded to include the care and maintenance of Chapman’s libido. Not only did they have to cook, clean, and find entertainment for their ward, they were now expected to help him find women of easy virtue. The two policemen accepted this new duty with cheerful resignation. Up to now, MI5 had sought to steer Chapman away from what Reed had delicately termed “feminine relaxation.” Now they were instructed that if Chapman wanted to relax, he should be encouraged to do so.

  On January 15, 1943, after dinner at the Landsdowne pub, Chapman and Backwell went to a part of New Bond Street known to be a red-light area. After a hurried negotiation in a doorway, Chapman picked up a prostitute, who took him to a flat above a shop. “Luckily there was a pub10 just opposite,” reported Backwell, “and he promised to meet me there in about half an hour. He was as good as his word.” A few days later, the crook and the policemen went out “relaxing” together. In Lyons Corner House, they met two girls, Doris and Helen, and invited them out to dinner. The men agreed beforehand that if anyone asked what Chapman did, they would say he was a member of the armed forces “just back from abroad”11—a cover story that would also explain why he was so unfamiliar with life in wartime Britain.

  Chapman had last lived in London in 1939, and the city had changed almost beyond recognition. The Blitz had stiffened British resolve, but it had left livid scars across the capital, inflicting some forty-three thousand deaths, destroying more than a million houses, and damaging such landmarks as the Houses of Parliament and St. James’s Palace. Chapman had left a swinging, prosperous London. The one he returned to was shabby and toughened, crouched in self-defense, festooned in barbed wire, inured to deprivation, and braced for the next assault. It would take Chapman weeks to adapt to this transformed world of coupons and rationing, blackouts and bomb shelters.

  The visit to New Bond Street, perhaps inevitably, afforded only temporary relief. Soon, Chapman was more depressed than ever. His minders came up with more elaborate diversions. One night, with Chapman wrapped up in coat, hat, and scarf, they took him to see the stirring wartime film epic In Which We Serve, starring Noël Coward, Chapman’s old acquaintance from his Soho days. Chapman was warned to be alert, and if he saw anyone he knew to make himself scarce and then meet his minders at a prearranged place. For a while the system worked well, and several times Chapman was able to spot former associates before they saw him. “There was one amazing thing12 about Eddie,” Backwell reported. “When it came to faces and descriptions he was superb. Often in London he would single out faces that he had seen before in a quite different place.”

  But Chapman’s own features were also distinctive. One evening, at the entrance to Prince’s restaurant in the West End, Chapman came face-to-face with a “cat-burglar”13 in a brown, double-breasted suit, whom he had known before the war. Flushed and “slightly drunk,”14 the man thrust out a hand and said: “Hullo, stranger, fancy seeing you.” Tooth prepared to intervene, but Chapman “looked hard at the man, said a formal ‘Hullo,’ and continued down the stairs.” The man followed, apologizing for his mistake but still insisting that Chapman was the “split [sic] image of someone he knew.” Chapman now broke into French—“some jocular remark15 about having a twin”—and left the astonished man in the doorway. Backwell believed the bluff had worked: “The man apologised16 and left, somewhat bewildered but, I think, fairly sure he had made a mistake.” Chapman claimed that he had forgotten the man’s name; none of his minders believed him. “I suppose it is natural17 for Zigzag not to reve
al the identity of this cat-burglar out of a sense of loyalty to his previous criminal associates,” reflected Reed. “After all, it is really not our concern.”

  The incident merely served to reinforce Chapman’s frustration with his semicaptivity, in which he could observe the London he knew, but never be a part of it. He demanded to see Winston, his younger brother, whom he believed to be in the army, but was told (falsely) that “so far our inquiries18 indicated that his brother was in India.” One night, he contemplated climbing out the window at Crespigny Road and heading to the West End, but a flash of conscience stopped him, the realization that “it was not in the interests19 of his work or of his companions.” Yet he hankered for his old friends, and asked Reed to find Betty Farmer. Reed was not certain whether this was for amorous purposes, or to apologize for having abandoned her so spectacularly in a Jersey hotel dining room three years earlier. As always, Chapman’s motives were hard to read: Here was a man who kept every option open, who seemed congenitally incapable of taking a bet without hedging it. The last trace of Betty Farmer was her tearful statement to the Jersey police back in 1939. She had vanished. Reed thought this was just as well. Chapman’s emotional life was already complicated enough.

  It was decided to arrange a meeting with one of the very few people of Chapman’s acquaintance who could be trusted: Terence Young, the filmmaker who was now an intelligence officer attached to the Field Security Section, Guards Armoured Division, in the Home Forces. In the intervening years, Young had become something of a celebrity as an up-and-coming film director, and there were moves afoot to take him out of uniform to make propaganda films. Churchill was said to have taken a “personal interest” in the project. Young was approached by Marshall of B1A, and asked, over tea at Claridge’s, whether he would meet Chapman, in conditions of strict secrecy, to “talk to him20 about some of his old friends” and “build up his morale.” Young was delighted to agree, saying he had often wondered what had happened to his wicked old friend. “He said that Zigzag was a crook and would always be one,” Marshall reported, “but an extraordinary fellow.”

  Young went on to describe the glamorous, roué world Chapman had inhabited before the war, the people he knew from “the film, theatrical, literary, and semi-political and diplomatic worlds,” and his popularity, “especially among women.” Could Chapman be trusted with intelligence work? Marshall inquired. Young was adamant: “One could give him the most difficult of missions knowing that he would carry it out and that he would never betray the official who sent him, but that it was highly probable that he would, incidentally, rob the official who sent him out…He would then carry out his [mission] and return to the official whom he had robbed to report.” In short, he could be relied on to do whatever was asked of him, while being utterly untrustworthy in almost every other respect.

  Chapman and Young were reunited over a late dinner in a discreet corner booth at the Savoy, with Marshall as chaperone. They seemed “delighted to see each other and conversation was very animated,” Marshall reported. As the drink flowed, however, the discussion turned to the war, and Young expressed the view that an Allied victory was “inevitable.” Chapman shot back that this was “smug and complacent,” before launching into a paean about “Hitler’s idealism and the strength and efficiency of the German soldier.” Despite the reeducation efforts of Tooth and Backwell, the effects of living among Nazis for so long still lingered. On the way home to Crespigny Road, Marshall warned Chapman of the “folly of expressing such views, no matter how true they might be.”

  Chapman’s faith in German military efficiency was being undermined in another way: The Abwehr was still having technical difficulty with its wireless receivers. The Most Secret Sources revealed that a new radio station, code-named “Horst” and manned by a full-time operator identified as Leutnant Vogy, had been set up specifically to receive Fritz’s messages at Saint-Jean-de-Luz. But on January 14, Maurice sent a message saying Chapman should continue to send his messages blind, because the new aerial had blown down. This new proof of ineptitude offered an opportunity to put the Germans on the defensive. The next message from Fritz to von Gröning was, in Chapman’s words, “a stinker”: FFFFF DISGUSTED21 AND WORRIED BY LACK OF RECEPTION. THIS IS A HOPELESS BUNGLE. HAVE BEEN PROMISED FULL SUPPORT AND MUST HAVE IT. WORK GOING SPLENDIDLY. HAVE FULL LIST OF ALL YOU WANT. YOU MUST DO SOMETHING TO CLEAR UP THE TROUBLE. F.

  For the next few days, Abwehr radio traffic was studied to gauge the effects of this broadside. There was nothing. Plainly, the radio operator had simply decided to suppress the irate message in order, in Reed’s words, “not to reap22 the wrath” of von Gröning. Not for the first time (or the last), the smaller cogs in a large machine took a unilateral decision to prevent the boss from finding out about their own incompetence. A few days later, Maurice sent a meek message saying that the aerial had been fixed and “new arrangements23 have been made.” From that moment on, transmission and reception worked perfectly.

  Backwell took Chapman shopping for bombs. If Chapman was going to convince the Germans he had wrecked the De Havilland factory with explosives, then he must test whether it was possible, in reality, to obtain the necessary ingredients. It was astonishingly easy. At Timothy Whites, they bought potassium chlorate in the shape of weed killer. At Boots in Harrow, they picked up potassium permanganate and nitrate of saltpeter. J. W. Quibell in the Finchley Road was happy to sell Chapman sulfur powder, moth crystals, and aluminum powder in the form of silver paint. Flour and sugar could be bought, for a price, at any grocer. Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.) Chapman’s shopping list was never queried: when he mistakenly asked for “Kalium”24 (German for potassium), a pharmacist’s assistant merely thought he was being asked for calcium. Back at Crespigny Road, Chapman experimented “on a small scale” with mixing various explosives. This time he did not practice blowing anything up; unlike the neighbors at La Bretonnière, the good people of Hendon would certainly not have tolerated lumps of burning tree stump whizzing around their back gardens. “This kept Eddie busy,”25 wrote Backwell, but “he was terribly restless, and could not concentrate for long on any one thing.”

  Perhaps Chapman should have been content, making bombs, brushing up his German, meeting old friends, sending sharp little notes to his German masters, and gathering together the strands of a cover story, but he was miserable. His longing to see Freda and the child had become an obsession. He talked of little else. Reed realized that a problem was about to ignite a crisis: “In this frame of mind26 he might easily have gone bad on us when he returned, and revealed to the enemy his association with us. Even if this did not happen he would probably have been unwilling to carry out any of our instructions and would have acted entirely on impulse and his own fancies.”

  Marshall, Reed’s deputy, was sent to Crespigny Road to have a heart-to-heart with Chapman over a bottle of whiskey. Marshall was a sympathetic character, and an excellent listener. As they drank and talked, Chapman began to open up as never before. He spoke entirely in French, which “tends to break down27 his natural reserve and to lead him to express his innermost thoughts,” Marshall noted. Chapman talked of his harsh childhood, his resentment at his lack of education, his impatience and his desire to make amends for the past, and of his desire to find a rationale for living, or dying.

  They talked until three in the morning. Marshall’s nine-page account of this “serious and intimate”28 conversation is one of the most revealing documents in the Zigzag files: a complete character study of a man wrestling with differing elements in his own nature.

  “He is endeavouring, perhaps for the first time, to understand himself and the meaning of life,” wrote Marshall. “During the last three years he has discovered thought, H.G. Wells, literature, altruistic motives and beauty. Although he does not regret his past life he feels he has no place in
society and it would be better if he dies—but not needlessly. He wishes to make retribution for the bad things he has done. He cannot be satisfied that he has done something of value unless he actually performs some concrete action himself.”

  He confessed that he was torn between patriotism and egotism, and “fighting against himself.” Hitherto, he had always “acted for himself and had done what he wanted to do,” but he had changed. “Now he had realised that he must consider other people and he was finding it very difficult.” At one stage, Chapman turned to his companion with a pained expression and asked: “Do you consider that personal life is more important than one’s country or ideals?”

  Marshall replied that he did not.

  The next question was still more profound: “What do you think is the purpose of life?”

  This time Marshall had his answer: “I said that I believed that man was climbing to some high destiny, that he had struggled from his ape-like existence to his present state of civilisation, that he was gradually climbing and that it was the duty of every one of us to help man onwards in his ascent.”

  Realizing how high-minded this must sound, Marshall added quickly: “This does not necessarily mean we have to be ‘goody-goody.’ War is a bestiality.”

  Chapman pondered Marshall’s words, and remarked that this credo was similar to that of H. G. Wells and, insofar as he had one, his own philosophy. They spoke of socialism and capitalism, patriotism and duty. “It rather seemed,” thought Marshall, “as if he had come on these things for the first time, and thought them great discoveries, as indeed they are.”

  Now it was Marshall’s turn to ask a question: “What personal part do you propose to play in helping man in his struggle?”