Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  The precariousness of the situation was underlined when Chapman was summoned to von Gröning’s flat one evening and presented to a tall, gray-haired man in an expensive-looking English suit. He introduced himself as “Doktor König,” in excellent English with an American accent, and he seemed to know Chapman’s story alarmingly well. There was something about the intensity of his clinical manner and “hawk-like”9 gaze that was deeply unnerving. Chapman concluded he must be “some kind of psychologist.”10 Without preamble, König launched into a detailed interrogation that had clearly been prepared “with a view to testing11 his reliability.” Chapman was being hunted.

  König: “Where could you leave12 a valuable package safely in London?”

  Chapman: “The Eagle Club, Soho.”

  “Who would you leave it with?”

  “Milly Blackwood,” said Chapman, thinking quickly. Milly had indeed been the owner of the Eagle, but she was now, he knew, safely dead.

  “Where would you conceal a secret message for another agent?”

  “In a telephone booth or a public lavatory.”

  “Where did you leave your wireless?”

  “I have the address of a house, in the garden of which, near a certain tree, I buried it.”

  The interrogator paused and gave Chapman a long look: “I am in charge of an agent who will shortly be going to England on a mission. The agent might need the wireless.”

  Suddenly, with a lurch, Chapman sensed the trap. The wireless, of course, was stashed away in a cupboard in Whitehall, and he had no way of contacting his British handlers to arrange for it to be buried. He could give an invented address for the hiding place, but if the Germans did send an agent to find it and turned up nothing, his entire story would unravel. No one in MI5 had spotted this flaw in his story. Even von Gröning had missed it, or chosen to overlook it. Was it a bluff? Dare he counterbluff? He was first vague, and then petulant, complaining it was “unfair” to give his radio to another agent. “I myself expect13 one day to be sent back to England,” he blustered. It was hardly a convincing argument. The Abwehr could easily find him another transmitter. The gray-haired interrogator eyed him coldly. It was, Chapman said with thumping understatement, an “uncomfortable moment.”14

  That evening, the gray-haired man escorted Chapman to a quiet restaurant and began to ply him with cognac, while “periodically asking awkward questions.”15 Chapman got drunk, but not nearly as drunk as he appeared. By the end of the evening, the hawk-faced man was also slurring his words and seemed more “benign,”16 but as Chapman staggered to his feet, the man fixed him with an unblinking look. “You are not absolutely sincere,”17 he said.

  Chapman held the stare for a second, and then grinned: “I know I am not.”18

  When Chapman returned to the flat in Grønnegate the next morning, the gray-haired visitor had vanished, and von Gröning was in a buoyant mood. “The doctor was quite satisfied19 with your answers and information,” he said breezily. “You passed the test.”

  There were other tests. A few nights later, Chapman was sitting alone in the Löwenbräu, waiting for Dagmar, when a Norwegian woman aged about forty-five sat down beside him and introduced herself as Anne. They began chatting in German. Anne remarked on his accent. Chapman replied that he had been raised in America. They switched to English, which she spoke perfectly. In an undertone, she began to complain about the occupation, the lack of food, and the swaggering German soldiers. Chapman listened but said nothing. She invited him to dinner. He politely declined. As soon as Dagmar arrived, Chapman rose swiftly and announced they were leaving. A few nights later, he saw Anne again at the Löwenbräu. She was very drunk. Chapman looked away, but she spotted him, weaved up, and hissed: “I think you are a British spy.”20 The remark was loud enough to be heard at the next table. When Chapman related the incident to von Gröning, the German remarked simply: “Leave it to me.”21 Chapman told himself that this Anne must have been an agent provocateur for the Germans; but perhaps she had been a genuine member of the resistance, testing his loyalties, and he had exposed her. He never saw her again.

  The underground war raged, for the resistance was gaining in confidence, coherence, and skill. From 1942, British-trained Norwegian saboteurs launched a series of attacks on the Vemork hydroelectric plant to prevent the Germans from acquiring heavy water, which could be used to produce nuclear weapons. These operations, combined with Allied bombing attacks, effectively put the plant out of production and crippled the Nazi nuclear program in Norway. Each act of resistance, however, was followed by a terrible reprisal. After two Gestapo officers were shot in the fishing village of Televäg, the entire male population was murdered or sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the village was razed, and the livestock were confiscated.

  One afternoon, as Chapman and Dagmar drank a cup of tea in his room, a shattering explosion rocked the hotel. Chapman stuffed his few belongings into a suitcase, then he and Dagmar clattered down the staircase to join the throng in the street, staring in wonder as the top floor of the hotel blazed. The Norwegian fire brigade arrived and began putting out the fire, as slowly and inefficiently as possible, spraying water everywhere while the Norwegian crowd jeered and cheered. Chapman thought the scene worthy of a Marx brothers script. By the time the firemen had completed their leisurely work, the Forbunds Hotel was in ruins. Dagmar disappeared from Chapman’s side and returned a few moments later: “It is the work22 of the British,” she whispered.

  Chapman and his minders moved into new quarters, Kapelveien 15, a safe house in the northern suburb of Grafsin that would become the Oslo equivalent of Crespigny Road, with Holst and Praetorius playing the parts of Backwell and Tooth. In an echo of the domestic arrangements with Freda, Chapman urged Dagmar to live there, too. At first, she resisted. Her countrymen would spurn her even more as a “kept woman,”23 and who would pay the rent? Chapman laughed, explaining that there was “sufficient money24 for them both.” Dagmar moved in.

  The money was indeed plentiful, but not endless, and Chapman was burning through it at an astonishing rate. Von Gröning was only too happy to dole out cash on demand; indeed, he encouraged Chapman to spend as much as possible, to host parties, buy Dagmar whatever she wanted, and foot the bill for every occasion. There was a method to von Gröning’s profligacy by proxy. Once Chapman had spent his money, he would need to go back to work; an impecunious spy, like a spy in love, was easier to handle.

  Chapman, typically, had no idea how much money was left, but he was not so careless that he failed to spot another aspect of von Gröning’s financial arrangements: The German was skimming his cut. If Chapman asked for, say, 10,000 kroner, von Gröning would agree, give him a chit to sign, but then hand over perhaps half that sum. However much he requested, von Gröning always produced less, and “pocketed the balance.”25 Von Gröning’s speculations on the stock market had been disastrous, but in Chapman he had found an investment offering a substantial return, and not just in terms of career development. Hitherto, Chapman had regarded von Gröning as his mentor: upright, aristocratic, and unassailable. Now he had demonstrated that he was also an embezzler, but Chapman was happy to let his spymaster “help himself.”26 Neither man alluded to what each knew was going on, their tacit understanding forming yet another strand in the web of complicity.

  Kapelveien 15 could have been an illustration from a Nordic book of fairy tales—a large wooden house set back off the road in a large garden dotted with fruit trees and currant bushes. Roses clambered over the roof. “It was a delightful spot,”27 Chapman reflected. On the door was a nameplate: “Feltman.” Like La Bretonnière, his new home had once had Jewish owners. Idly, Chapman wondered what had happened to them.

  Joshua and Rachel Feltman had emigrated to Norway from Russia in the 1920s. They had opened a barbershop, and then a clothes shop. They had done well. In 1927, Joshua bought the house at Grafsin. Rachel could have no children of her own, but she adopted a nephew, Herman, and raised him as her own
son. The neighbors welcomed them. Then came the horror.

  Like everyone else, the Feltmans witnessed the invasion with mounting disbelief and deepening fear. Joshua was a big, placid man who believed the best of everyone. The Nazis were human too, he said. At first, it seemed he might be right. But then, early in 1942, the Feltmans were summarily ordered to leave their home. They moved into a flat above the shop. Herman, now twenty-four years old, urged his parents to take refuge in neutral Sweden; the Germans were beginning to round up Jews, and tales of frightful atrocities had begun to filter northward from Europe. Joshua hesitated, and Herman decided to go alone, to prepare the way for his mother and father. With a Jewish friend, he boarded a train for Stockholm. As the border approached, Nazi soldiers climbed aboard and began demanding documents. Herman’s papers declared him to be Jewish. He jumped from the moving train, breaking an arm and fracturing his spine. He was still in a hospital when the Germans arrested him and shipped him to Poland.

  Unaware of their son’s fate, still Joshua and Rachel wavered, but then, when the Nazis began to corral the small community of Norwegian Jews, they ran. Milorg offered to help smuggle them to Sweden; a group of partisans would take them, on foot, to the border, and see them safely across. Joshua loaded their possessions onto his back, and they set off. No one knows exactly what happened next. Perhaps the partisans coveted the few chattels in Joshua’s sack. Perhaps their guides were secret collaborators. Soon after Chapman and Dagmar moved into Kapelveien 15, the dead bodies of the Feltmans were found in woods near the Swedish border. A few weeks later, their only son, Herman, was gassed and cremated in Auschwitz.

  Seventeen-year-old Leife Myhre, who lived at Number 13, watched the new neighbors move in. He had run errands on Saturday mornings for Joshua Feltman, and Rachel Feltman had given him biscuits. He liked the Feltmans—“they were fair,28 hardworking, straightforward people”—and he hated the Germans. At first, some German officers had moved into Number 15, but now a new set of neighbors had taken their place. They wore civilian clothes, and over the fence he heard them speaking English. They had big parties, and afterward they would line up the bottles and shoot them, one by one. Sometimes they shot rats in the garden. “They were in extremely good physical condition.29 One day the telephone rang, and I saw one of them run all the way up the garden and then dive straight through an open window to answer it.” Leife was impressed, in spite of himself. He never spoke to anyone in the house, except once, after the Norwegian woman moved in. “She was very attractive, and not much older than me. Once, when I saw her on the street, I stopped her and said: ‘You shouldn’t be mixing with these Germans you know.’ She looked around and blushed and then she whispered to me: ‘I am not working for them, you know.’ ” There was something in her expression—embarrassment, defiance, fear—that Leife never forgot.

  Chapman, his lover, and his minders settled happily into the pretty house stolen from the murdered Feltmans. Chapman took photographs of the domesticated evening scene: Dagmar sewing a button on his jacket in the living room, her face shyly, or perhaps intentionally, averted; Holst, unconscious from drink on the sofa, his hand thrust down his trousers, wearing a smile of stupefaction. Chapman invariably won the shooting competitions in the back garden because Holst could not hold a gun straight on account of the DTs. Meanwhile, Praetorius would practice English country-dance steps on the back porch. Sometimes von Gröning would come to dinner. Dagmar was told that the paunchy visitor was a Belgian journalist.

  One morning in May, von Gröning appeared at the house and told Chapman that they would be leaving for Berlin in a few hours, to see “certain people,30 connected with sabotage organisation, [who] were interested in his story.” That evening, they checked into the Hotel Alexandria on Berlin’s Mittelstrasse, and then drove on to a flat where three men were waiting: a Hauptmann in a Wehrmacht uniform, a Luftwaffe lieutenant colonel, and an SS officer in civilian clothes who was plainly drunk and “applied himself freely31 to a bottle of cognac” throughout the meeting. They asked Chapman some vague questions about the De Havilland plant and other potential sabotage targets in Britain, in particular the location of “vital machinery, requiring replacement from America.” Chapman pointed out, sensibly, that any such military factory would be heavily guarded. While the panel absorbed this sobering thought, another bottle of brandy was opened. When that was finished, the meeting broke up.

  Von Gröning was livid, declaring that he was “disgusted with the whole affair.” The colonel was a fool, and the SS man was plastered, he said. Chapman was also somewhat baffled by the strange encounter, but the meeting had provided one useful piece of intelligence: The higher powers were evidently planning to send him on another mission to Britain. If that were the case, he would need something to present to MI5 on his return.

  Chapman had not been entirely idle during those lazy days on the fjords, for as he cruised around Oslo, he had been quietly filling out the questionnaire he had brought in his head. He noted down possible RAF targets—ammunition dumps, the huge tanks where the Luftwaffe stored petrol on the Eckberg isthmus, the harbors where the U-boats docked and refueled. He memorized the faces of the officials he met, the names he picked up, the addresses of key German administration buildings, and descriptions of the informers and collaborators who milled around the bars. “It all depends32 on the opportunities that you see presented to you,” Rothschild had told him. Slowly, surreptitiously, Chapman drew a mental map of the German occupation of Oslo.

  One afternoon after his return from Berlin, Chapman and Dagmar untied the little yawl from its mooring and set sail, slipping out under the shadow of Akershus Fortress and heading into the expanse of Oslo Fjord. With Chapman at the tiller, they sailed past the Aker shipyards toward the Bygdøy peninsula, the finger of land that curls into Oslo’s bay like a question mark. A mile from the harbor, Chapman dropped anchor, and they waded onto a small pebble beach, empty except for some deserted fishing huts.

  Bygdøy was Norway’s most exclusive preserve, a gated, guarded enclave divided into a series of estates, including one of the royal properties. Now it was the home of Vidkun Quisling. The pair climbed through a patch of dense woodland and found a path leading to the hilltop, on which stood a huge stone mansion, once home to a Norwegian millionaire, and now Quisling’s private fortress and administrative headquarters. He had named it Gimli, after the great hall in Norse mythology where righteous souls dwell for eternity. Leading Dagmar by the hand, Chapman kept to the woods skirting the estate until they came in sight of a machine-gun tower guarding a gated entrance. Beyond it, an avenue of lime trees led to the villa. Chapman mentally measured the barbed-wire fences and counted the armed guards.

  Back on board, Chapman opened a bottle of cognac, then set sail. As they scudded through the waves, he gave the helm to Dagmar, while he sketched a map of the Quisling estate and its defenses; Tar Robertson would be most interested. Chapman could never explain when, or even quite why, he decided to confess his true identity to Dagmar. Perhaps he simply could not bear to lie any more. He later denied that he had been “under the influence33 of drink at the time,” which suggests that he was at least a little tipsy. Undoubtedly, the Ice Front played a part. Dagmar had been ostracized by her own people as a “Nazi whore”34 she, Chapman, and a handful of others within the Norwegian resistance knew otherwise, but he could see the effect it was having on her. Chapman knew that “he risked losing her35 if he continued to impersonate a German,” and holding on to Dagmar seemed more important than anything else.

  Farther down the coast, Chapman anchored the little yawl. At dusk, with Dagmar in his arms, he made his declaration: He told her he was a British spy, that the Germans believed him to be a German agent, and that he would shortly be returning to Britain on a mission. Dagmar was intrigued; she had always suspected that he was not German. Above all, she was relieved, for the discovery gave her a means to untangle her own motives and feelings. She had allowed herself to be picked up by a man she belie
ved to be German because she thought he might have information useful to the resistance, but also because he was handsome, charming, and generous. Now, having discovered his real identity, she could love him without shame. She was curious to learn the “details of Chapman’s work36 for the British,” but Chapman insisted that she should know as little as possible. He swore her to silence. She agreed, and took his secret to the grave.

  Thus was Dagmar Lahlum recruited, unofficially, into the British secret service. “You could be of use,” Chapman told her. Von Gröning seemed to like her; she should take every opportunity to be “alone with him” and get him to talk freely; she could also help to gather information on the other members of the Oslo Abwehr.

  Chapman’s declaration to Dagmar was an act of faith, but it was also a wild gamble. Her hatred of the Germans seemed as genuine as her feelings for him; he did not believe that she had been planted by the Germans at the Ritz as a honey trap. But he could not be certain. He set her a small test: to locate the Oslo headquarters of the Abwehr, which Chapman already knew. If she found the Abwehr HQ, it would be proof of her commitment; if she failed it, well, he would probably already be in a Gestapo prison, or dead. Dagmar accepted the challenge with gusto.