Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  The next morning, Captain Kearon told him that seven ships were missing from the convoy, three of which had been sunk by collisions during the night, or from damage incurred by the exploding munitions ship. Chapman reflected that this was just the sort of information he might usefully pass on to the Germans in Lisbon, since it would confirm what they already knew, but demonstrate keenness on his part. For the same reason, Chapman began making daily notes of the ship’s position and course. Since German reconnaissance planes were already tracking the ships, “no harm would be done5 by giving the position of the convoy to the enemy.” The captain agreed, and offered to let Chapman see the ship’s logbook in order to chart their exact position. With his remaining secret ink, Chapman carefully wrote down the information on a sheet of writing paper.

  Captain Kearon was relishing his new role as spy’s assistant. But the rest of the crew did not know quite what to make of the new steward. Word of Anson’s prison record spread quickly, and it was agreed that he clearly was “a high-class burglar.”6 He seemed to have plenty of money, had a gold monogrammed cigarette case, and wore an expensive wristwatch. Anson’s nickname in Soho, he confided, was “Stripey,” on account of the time he had spent in striped prison garb. But for a crook, he was surprisingly polite and cultured; he read books in French “for pleasure.”7 “Several members of the crew8 were impressed by his good education,” Kearon later reported. “The gunlayer summed up9 the general opinion that he was man of good family gone wrong.” One evening, Chapman astonished the ship’s company by announcing that he would compose a poem, there and then. With a pencil and an envelope he set to work, and then declaimed the result.

  Happy go lucky,10 come what may

  Three cheers for Stripey, hip hip Hooray.

  As poetry goes, this little spasm of doggerel may not be up to much, but to the ears of Chapman’s messmates it was Shakespeare, further evidence that they were in the presence of a genuine gentleman robber. Anson was certainly bolshie enough to be a poet, for he grumbled unceasingly. The captain duly noted down his poor attitude in the ship’s log: “He said he did not like11 sea life as no one did their share of work, he said he did most of the work. This is definitely untrue, as I, master, have observed.”

  On the eighteenth, the City of Lancaster steamed into Lisbon port and tied up at Santos Quay. Portugal was still neutral, though its dictator was inclining to the Nazis, and Lisbon was a boiling cauldron of espionage, awash with refugees, smugglers, spies, hustlers, arms dealers, wheeler-dealers, middlemen, deserters, profiteers, and prostitutes. It was Chapman’s kind of town. John Masterman described Lisbon in his postwar novel, The Case of the Four Friends, as a “sort of international clearing ground,12 a busy ant heap of spies and agents, where political and military secrets and information—true and false, but mainly false—were bought and sold and where men’s brains were pitted against each other.” The Allied and Axis powers maintained safe houses, dead drops, fleets of informants, and small armies of competing spies, as well as official consulates and embassies, all under the thin veneer of neutrality. The Abwehr even ran its own bars and brothels, for the express purpose of extracting information from sex-starved and drunken British sailors.

  The crew of the City of Lancaster assembled on deck for a lecture about avoiding strong drink and loose women while on shore. The bosun, Valsamas, distinctly overheard Anson whisper: “Pay no attention.13 That’s just a lot of bullshit.”

  On land, the assistant steward joined four of his crewmates at the British Seaman’s Institute in Rua da Moeda, where all proceeded to get loudly drunk, in the traditional manner. Anson declared that he would pay, but after an hour of steady drinking at MI5’s expense, the new assistant steward told one of the gunners he had “business to attend to” in town with an old acquaintance.

  “If I find this friend14 I am well away,” he confided.

  When Gunner Humphries pressed him about the identity of his friend, Chapman merely winked and remarked mysteriously: “No names,15 no packdrill.” He agreed to meet them later at George’s, a brothel-bar on the dockside.

  A few days earlier, Bletchley Park had decoded an Abwehr message to another double agent, code-named “Father,” indicating that the safe house at 50 Rua São Mamede had been “brûlé,” or “burned.”16 MI5 had no way of warning Agent Zigzag that his contact address had metaphorically gone up in smoke.

  Chapman’s taxi dropped him at a large, dirty building, deep in the working-class district of the city. The door was answered by a young girl, who fetched her mother. “Joli Albert,”17 said Chapman brightly, and then in halting Portuguese: “My name is Fritz. May I see Senhor Fonseca?” This declaration was met with “blank faces.”18 He tried again in German, English, and French. Finally, he wrote the name “Fonseca” on a piece of paper. This provoked a flicker of recognition, and from the ensuing mime he understood that Senhor Fonseca was not in. He wrote down the word “telephone.”19 After some more gesticulating, the girl led him to a nearby café, dialed a number, and handed the receiver to Chapman. A man’s voice answered. “Joli Albert,” said Chapman. The password was no more effective, but at least the man spoke a form of French. He agreed to meet Chapman at the café next door. With deep misgivings, Chapman waited, smoking heavily and drinking foul Portuguese brandy. Finally, a slim young man in his late twenties appeared, with a much older man, who spoke German. Once more Chapman gave his password, and explained that he needed to see a senior Abwehr officer. Their alarmed expressions indicated how badly the plan had gone awry. Clearly, they “did not know anything20 about the matter,” and with every word he uttered, Chapman was putting himself in greater peril. He apologized for his mistake and told the two men to “forget the whole business.”21 Then he ran.

  Back at George’s Bar, the party was in full swing. Chapman slipped into the throng of sailors and tarts, his return almost unnoticed, and was soon in conversation with an English-speaking Portuguese barmaid called Anita. She was twenty-six, thin, with a dark complexion, wavy black hair, and deep-brown eyes. She was also a prostitute and a paid MI6 informant. She would later tell British intelligence that the man everyone knew as Anson had confided that his real name was Reed. Ronnie would have been scandalized.

  Chapman spent the night with Anita in a small hotel near the harbor, wondering if the Germans had given up on him, whether he was heading into a trap, and whether his career as a double agent was already over.

  Early next morning, Chapman entered the smart lobby of the German Legation on Rua do Pau de Bandeira and told the sleepy man at the front desk that his name was Fritz, that he was a German agent, and that he would like to see the senior Abwehr officer. The man yawned and told him to come back in two hours. When he returned, the receptionist was markedly more alert, even attentive. An official of some sort appeared, and told Chapman to go to a house in the nearby Rua Buenos Aires. Outside the address he had been given, a Fiat car was waiting with the engine running and two civilians in the front seat. Chapman was told to sit in the back and was driven in silence to yet another address, a flat at 25 Rua Borges Carneiro. There he was escorted upstairs, where the two men politely invited him to explain his business. Chapman told the story he knew by heart, for the first of what would be many recitations. The taller of the two, clearly senior, nodded and occasionally asked questions, while the other, a small, fat man, took notes. When Chapman had finished, the tall man thanked him politely, and told him to remain on board his ship but to kindly return to this address the following day.

  That evening, Captain Kearon could be heard roasting Steward Anson for spending a night ashore without permission and warning him bluntly about the perils of venereal disease. When Anson told the captain to “mind his own business,”22 Kearon exploded and told him “any future offence23 must entail prosecution at home.” The crew agreed: Anson was on very thin ice.

  Though Captain Kearon put on a grand show of fury, the master of the City of Lancaster was deeply relieved to see Chapman return. When
they were alone, Chapman described how he had spent two days being ferried and shunted from place to place, and added that if and when he came to make a report to MI5, he could tell them that the Abwehr was a bureaucratic nightmare. Kearon would later state: “He instructed me24 to report that the organization worked just the same as it does in London. He said Ronnie would be pleased to hear that!” Kearon made a suggestion: When Chapman was ready to leave the ship, he should start a fight. This would allow the captain to punish him, and provide the obvious rationale that Anson had jumped ship to avoid another prison sentence in Britain.

  When Chapman returned the next day to Rua Borges Carneiro, he was ushered into the presence of an elegant young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who introduced himself as “Baumann” in excellent English and “apologised for the inconvenience”25 of the previous day, as well as Germany’s failure to welcome him with due fanfare. The man offered Chapman a cigar and a glass of brandy, then invited him to tell his story once more. The identity of Chapman’s suave interrogator is uncertain: MI5 would later identify Baumann, alias Blaum, alias Bodo, as an officer who had served as chief of the Abwehr sabotage section in Lisbon since 1942. But it is equally possible that Baumann was Major Kremer von Auenrode, alias Ludovico von Kartsthoff, the head of the Lisbon Abwehr station. Chapman himself believed that Baumann was “connected with Johnny,”26 the German code name for Agent Snow. Owens’s German controller had been a Major Nikolaus Ritter, alias Doktor Rantzau. Whoever he was, Baumann seemed to know a great deal about Chapman’s time in France, his mission, and its results.

  Chapman handed over the sheets of paper with the secret writing, and then made Baumann an offer he had been mulling ever since setting sail for Lisbon. During his sabotage training in Berlin, Chapman explained, he had learned how to construct a coal bomb by drilling a cavity into a large lump of coal and then packing it with high explosive. Placed in the bunkers of a ship, the device would remain unnoticed until shoveled into the furnace, whereupon it would explode, sinking the vessel.

  If Baumann would provide him with such a bomb, said Chapman, he would hide it among the coal on the City of Lancaster, then jump ship as planned, and send the boat, her captain, and her crew to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Tar Robertson was unflappable. But when the latest batch of wireless intercepts arrived from the Most Secret Sources on the morning of March 21, he almost took flight. Agent Zigzag had been in Lisbon two days, and already he seemed to be contemplating an act of gross treachery by offering to sink the ship that had taken him there.

  In a top secret message, the Abwehr station in Lisbon had informed Admiral Wilhelm Canaris that Agent Fritz was in a position to sabotage a British merchant vessel with a coal bomb, and requested authorization to proceed. The operation required permission from the Abwehr chief himself, since it “contravened the established policy27 of the Abwehr not to undertake sabotage in or from Portugal.” To make matters worse, the same message described the precise route to Lisbon taken by the City of Lancaster, and how many ships had been sunk in the attack on the convoy: This information could only come from Chapman. At the very least, he had “told the Germans28 more about his convoy than he should have done.” At worst, it was further evidence of treachery.

  Robertson convened a crisis meeting and drew up a series of goals, in order of priority. First, to protect the ship and its crew; second, to preserve the Ultra secret and the Most Secret Sources; and, finally, “not to interrupt29 Zigzag’s mission unless he was, or it seemed probable that he was, double-crossing us.”

  Reed could not believe that Chapman would turn traitor so swiftly. Had he been forced or instructed to carry out the sabotage, or was it his own idea? “Whatever view we took30 of Zigzag’s character and patriotism we could not run the risk of taking it for granted that he would not, in fact, commit the sabotage,” he wrote. While the meeting was still in progress, Berlin sent a message approving the sabotage of the City of Lancaster.

  MI6 had also read the cables, and offered to use its own people in Lisbon to neutralize Zigzag. Robertson told them to wait. The City of Lancaster was not due to leave port for a few days, and since Chapman was planning to jump ship just before she set sail, there was probably still time to intercept him and the coal bomb.

  Major Reed, wrote Tar, was “acquainted with the relevant facts31 and considerations.” Moreover, “the master and Zigzag both know Mr. Reed and it is therefore easier for him to approach them with less chance of arousing German suspicion.” Reed must fly to Lisbon at once, where he should find Chapman and interrogate him immediately. Unless Chapman volunteered information about the sabotage plot, freely and without prompting, he should be arrested at gunpoint and “brought back in irons.”32 Chapman might be surprised to see Reed pop up in Lisbon, but there was no reason he should deduce that the Abwehr’s messages had been intercepted: “It would be quite natural33 for us to send Mr. Reed out to ascertain if he had contacted the Germans and what they had said.”

  Little Ronnie Reed, the radio ham who had joined up because he liked to play with wirelesses, was about to find himself a leading player in a rapidly unfolding drama that might require him to bring a known criminal back to justice at the point of a gun.

  While Reed was scrambling to catch the next passenger flight to Lisbon, Chapman went back to Rua Borges Carneiro to pick up the bombs. A few days earlier, he had handed Baumann a sample lump of coal from the ship’s bunkers. Welsh coal has a distinctive grain and color, and the German forgers had achieved remarkable results. Baumann now presented him with two irregular black lumps about six inches square—in shape, weight, and texture indistinguishable from real Welsh coal. Rather than drill out an existing piece of coal, as the Doctor had done, in order to pack in more explosive Baumann’s engineers had taken a canister of explosive with a fuse attached and molded a plastic covering around it, which had been painted and covered in coal dust. The only clue to the lethal contents was “a small aperture,34 the diameter of a pencil, in one face.”

  Chapman was impressed: The bombs, he declared, “could not possibly be detected.”35 He told Baumann that he would plant them in the bunkers that night and jump ship the following morning. Baumann confirmed that all the necessary paperwork was ready to get him out of the country, including a new passport with a photograph taken in Lisbon two days earlier.

  That evening, Chapman walked up the gangplank of the City of Lancaster, somewhat gingerly, with two large coal bombs in a rucksack strapped to his back. He did not know that Ronnie Reed was hurtling toward Portugal as fast as wartime air travel could carry him; nor did he know that Captain Jarvis of MI6 had posted an agent to watch the ship, and was standing by for orders to seize and, if necessary, kill him.

  But Chapman was not going anywhere near the furnace, and he had no intention of blowing up the ship. He was simply using his initiative, as instructed. His friend and fellow bomb enthusiast, that courtly and well-bred “Mr. Fisher,” had asked him to obtain some German sabotage “toys,” and that was precisely what he intended to do. Mr. Fisher, he reflected, would be thrilled to get his hands on the two beauties in his backpack.

  Once on board, Chapman carefully stashed the rucksack in his locker. He then approached a large gunner by the name of Dermot O’Connor, who was dozing on his bunk, and punched him hard on the nose. The brawny Irishman had been identified by Chapman as the crew member most likely to be goaded into a brawl without asking awkward questions. This conjecture was proven entirely accurate.

  O’Connor erupted from his berth like a surfacing killer whale, and the two men set about thumping one another with enthusiasm, noise, and any weaponry that came to hand. There are two versions of how the fight ended: According to Chapman’s self-flattering account, he finished off O’Connor by whacking him on the head with a half-empty bottle of whiskey; according to Captain Kearon (and every other witness), O’Connor neatly felled Chapman by head-butting him in the eye. Chapman was carried off to the sick bay, bleeding profusely and
shouting that the Irishman had violated “the Queensberry rules.”36 When they had been patched up, both men were fined half a day’s pay by Captain Kearon, who loudly told Chapman that he was now in serious trouble.

  A farcical staged scene followed:

  CAPTAIN KEARON: “Have you met a better man37 at last?”

  ANSON: “After fighting him fairly and beating him by the Marquis of Queensberry rules he head-butted me in the face. The people on this ship are hooligans.”

  KEARON: “Are you the only decent one on board then?”

  ANSON: “Yes.”

  At dawn the next day, Assistant Steward Anson, the left side of his face cut and badly bruised, was detailed to take Captain Kearon his early morning tea. Chapman knocked on the door of the captain’s cabin and slipped inside, carrying a tea tray in one hand and a rucksack with two large bombs in the other. Chapman had earlier explained to Kearon that he was “trying to get a special bomb38 on board for transport to home,” and he now thrust the coal bombs into the captain’s hands, explaining that “he had put to them39 the proposition that he should sabotage the City of Lancaster and the enemy had agreed.” Kearon was no shrinking violet, but even he quailed at being handed ten pounds of high explosive in his bed by a man with a face that seemed to have gone through a meat grinder. He announced that he would weigh anchor immediately and head home. Chapman insisted that the bombs were safe unless heated, and that any change of plan would only attract German suspicion. The captain was eventually “persuaded to carry on his usual route and act as though nothing had happened.” Now wide awake, Kearon opened the safe, extracted Chapman’s package, pushed the two evil-looking bombs inside, and shut the door, quickly. Chapman stuffed the papers and money in his rucksack and handed the revolver back to the captain, “as a present.” In return, the captain gave Anson the address of his sister-in-law, Doris, who lived in Porto, just in case he had any trouble. They shook hands, and Chapman slipped away into the dawn.