Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  Chapman had finally convinced himself that Germany would lose the war without his help when, once again, the spymasters sprang into unexpected action. A message arrived from the new bosses in Berlin announcing that a plane was now “at Chapman’s disposal”36 he would fly from Holland on June 27. The reason for the sudden activity lay in the flying-bomb campaign. Uncertain of the effects of its mighty barrage due to the fog of British propaganda, Germany needed reliable eyes and ears on the ground. Chapman’s new mission was to assess the extent of the destruction caused by the V-1s and send back details, along with weather reports and barometric readings. He would act as target spotter and damage assessor, to enable the gunners to aim their flying bombs from launchpads in northern France with greater precision.

  In the paneled splendor of the Lutétia Hotel, von Gröning ran through Chapman’s mission. In order of priority, his tasks were to obtain details of Britain’s U-boat tracking apparatus; to locate and steal the device used in night fighter aircraft; to report on the effects of the V-1s, giving precise timings and the resulting damage; to provide weather reports; to locate the various U.S. air bases in Britain; to identify which German cities were being targeted by each air base, and to employ another member of his gang to monitor them and report using a second radio.

  The sheer complexity of Chapman’s multiple mission reflected a mounting desperation on the part of German intelligence, a realization that only a truly spectacular breakthrough could affect the momentum of the war. The Germans, unaware that their entire spy network had been turned against them, believed that they had several active agents in Britain. Some of these were held in high regard. None had ever been asked to undertake a mission of such difficulty and danger. Fritz had attained near-mythical status, and somewhere in the upper echelons of the German High Command it was believed, in a triumph of wishful thinking, that this lone British spy could yet help win the war for Germany.

  For this exalted purpose, Chapman was issued with the best espionage kit Germany could provide, including a miniature Wetzlar camera, a Leica camera (to be passed on to the unnamed spy in Britain), a Leitz range finder and exposure meter, and six rolls of film. No longer was there talk of Chapman unearthing his old radio in Britain; he now had two brand-new sets complete with aerials, headphones, five crystals, and a Bakelite Morse code key. For self-defense, and possible self-destruction, Chapman was handed a Colt revolver with seven rounds, and an aluminum phial containing a white liquid and several pills, poison with instant effects that “might come in useful, should anything go wrong.” Finally, Chapman was presented with a bulky canvas bag containing £6,001 in used notes of various denominations (the equivalent of almost $360,000 today), separated into envelopes—the most money Chapman had seen since the smash-and-grab raids of the 1930s. As part of his cover, he carried two fake letters: one addressed to Mr. James Hunt of St. Luke’s Mews, London; the other signed by “Betty” and filled with “harmless chatter.”37

  The Abwehr might have been disbanded, a failed organization in many ways, but nobody could fault its officers’ hospitality and sense of occasion. Von Gröning announced that a farewell luncheon would be held at the Lutétia Hotel for the departing Fritz, spy number V-6523. With every hour, the Allies drew closer to Paris, but in von Gröning’s convivial universe, there was always time for a party.

  And so, on June 25, 1944, a celebrated German spy and secret British double agent was guest of honor at a lunch party at the SS headquarters in occupied Paris. The guests were von Gröning, the sinister Kraus, two attractive secretaries from the typing pool, and an intelligence officer from Bremen who was a friend of von Gröning’s. In a paneled private dining room, around a table loaded with food and wine, the guests drank to Chapman’s health and wished him good luck. Even Chapman found the occasion “unreal.”38 Midway through the main course, the telephone rang and he was handed the receiver. It was a senior SS officer, conferring his personal best wishes and sending up “two bottles of cognac39 and cigarettes for the party.” Von Gröning rose tipsily to his feet and gave a farewell speech, extolling Chapman’s past exploits and predicting that his mission would have “a profound effect40 on the war.” Was there, perhaps, just a glimmer of irony in von Gröning’s voice when he raised a glass to Chapman’s future “triumph”41? Chapman noticed that Kraus wore his unnerving “half-smile”42 throughout.

  The bibulous farewell party spilled onto the pavement of the boulevard Raspail, as von Gröning, Chapman, and a large leather suitcase containing his equipment were loaded into a waiting car. “The last glimpse43 I had of the chiefs of the Lutétia was the group of them standing waving from the front steps as we drove away.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Prodigal Crook

  AS A BLUSTERY dawn rose over Cambridgeshire on the morning of June 29, three weeks after D-Day, a man in civilian clothes could be seen walking, unsteadily, down Six Mile Bottom Road, with a large leather suitcase balanced on his head, swearing to himself. Eddie Chapman was in a spectacularly bad mood. In the last twenty-four hours, he had been wined and dined, shot at, and hurled out of a plane at nearly four thousand feet; he had thrown up over his parachute overalls, and banged his head on a hard East Anglian road. And now he had been screamed at by a farmer’s wife, who threatened to set the dogs on him.

  A few hours earlier, after shaking hands with von Gröning, Chapman had been strapped into a harness in the back of a German Junkers 88 at the Soesterberg airfield, near Utrecht in Holland. The bomber pilot was a fresh-faced lad of about twenty-one. Schlichting, the pilot on his earlier flight, had, it seemed, been shot down in his “invisible” Focke-Wulf. This was not news to inspire confidence. Shortly before midnight, the bomber had climbed into the sky, crossed the North Sea at an altitude of just fifty feet, and then flew parallel to the coast, keeping “out of the direct light1 of the rising moon.”

  Once over the coast, the Junkers had come under attack from night fighters and antiaircraft batteries. The engines screamed as the pilot took evasive action, spiraling up to four thousand feet, and then plunging back down again. Chapman’s stomach rolled with every twist. His guts lurched again as flak thudded into the plane’s tail.

  Over the drop zone, Chapman tumbled out of the hatch into the darkness and drifted to earth for a dozen hideous minutes, buffeted by a strong wind and desperately trying to cling on to a large suitcase filled with radio and photographic equipment. Somewhere over Cambridge, clutching his cumbersome luggage, he had vomited the remains of the banquet from the Lutétia.

  Chapman’s second landing had been even worse than his first. Swinging wildly in the wind, he had narrowly avoided a hedge, and then landed hard on a country road between Cambridge and New-market, knocking himself out. For fifteen minutes, he lay stunned, before staggering to his feet. Groggily, he cut loose his pack, wrapped his overalls, gloves, kneepads, belt, and entrenching tool into the parachute, and hid the bundle under a hedge. Still dazed, he had knocked at the door of a nearby cottage and explained to the woman who answered it that he had just made a forced landing. The woman took one look at his civilian clothes, screeched in terror, and slammed the door in his face. Chapman had set off as fast as his jellied legs would carry him, fearful of a shotgun blast in the back. This was not the welcome he had been hoping for.

  At a smallholding, Chapman steeled himself to try again. This time, the reception was more cordial. He telephoned the nearest police station, and got through to the night-duty officer, who began, with plodding precision, to take down “the details”: name, place of birth, date of birth, married or single…

  “Peeved,”2 Chapman brusquely instructed the man to contact his chief constable immediately and explain that a British double agent had landed. “Don’t be silly,”3 said the policeman on the other end. “Go to bed.”

  Enraged, Chapman shouted: “That’s exactly what4 they told me last time. Ring up your station in Wisbech. They’ll remember me.”

  Finally, a sleepy Ronnie Reed was r
oused from his bed by a ringing telephone. “It’s Eddie,”5 said a familiar, high-pitched voice. “I’m back, with a new task.”

  Two hours later, Chapman found himself back in Camp 020, staring at his own reflection in the glinting monocle of Tin Eye Stephens. Two weeks earlier, the Most Secret Sources had intercepted a message from Paris to Berlin, signed by von Gröning, asking “whether operation possible6?” B1A was alerted: If von Gröning was back in business, then perhaps Zigzag was also about to resurface. An agent in Paris reported seeing a British man in the Lutétia Hotel answering to Chapman’s description, “a wiry type,7 a pure adventurer.”

  And here, to Stephens’s delight, was the rogue himself, “expansive in his conceit,”8 relating an almost impossible tale of survival, and describing the “splendid time”9 he had had in occupied Norway. “The courageous and ruthless10 Chapman has given satisfaction to his no less ruthless German employers,” wrote Stephens. “He has survived who knows what tests. He was apparently able to match their best drinkers without giving the show away, and to lead a life as hard as any of them.”

  After an hour of conversation, Chapman was “tired beyond the point11 of useful investigation,” but even a cursory interrogation suggested that “he will have a vast amount of intelligence of the highest order to impart.” Chapman was put to bed in a safe house in Hill Street in Mayfair, and fell into an exhausted sleep. Stephens, however, remained awake, writing and pondering. Tin Eye was possibly the least sentimental officer in the entire secret service, and Chapman scored highly in the three categories of human being he most despised: as a spy, a rake, and a “moral degenerate.”12 Yet he was impressed, even moved, by this strange young man: “The outstanding feature13 of the case is the courage of Chapman. Yet there is something more to the story than that, for Chapman has faced the searching inquiries of the German secret service with infinite resource. He has rendered, and may still render his country great service. For that, in return, Chapman deserves well of his country, and a pardon for his crimes.” A general instruction was circulated to all MI5 officers connected with the case stating that Zigzag should be “greeted as a returned friend14 to whom we owe much and who is no way under suspicion or supervision of any kind.”

  The next morning, Chapman was driven to the Naval & Military Club, where he was reunited with Tar Robertson and Ronnie Reed over a substantial breakfast. The warmth of their welcome could not have been more heartfelt. Reed was particularly delighted to see his friend “back safely,15 and roaring like a lion.” For the second time in two years, Chapman unburdened himself to his British spymasters. But this time his story was not the incoherent torrent of half-remembered facts he had brought from La Bretonnière, but the detailed, precise, minutely memorized dossier of a trained agent. He produced an undeveloped roll of film with photos of senior Abwehr officials, and a scrap of rice paper on which he had noted the code word used by Oslo for radio traffic—PRESSEMOTTAGELSETRONDHEIMSVEIEN—and the various crystal frequencies. He described in detail the people he had met, the places he had seen, and the various sensitive military sites he had identified as potential bombing targets. His observations were as meticulous and precise as his earlier reports had been vague and inchoate, offering a complete picture of the German occupying force: the location of the SS, Luftwaffe, and Abwehr headquarters in Oslo; tank depots; the U-Boat signals center; air supply bases; naval yards; German divisional signs; and flak defenses. From memory, he sketched a map locating Vidkun Quisling’s mansion in Bygdøy and described how he had “purposely put ashore16 there whilst yachting to view the house.”

  After breakfast, Chapman was given a medical examination by Dr. Harold Dearden, the psychiatrist at Camp 020, who pronounced him “mentally quite fit17 though physically tired.” At first, his listeners were inclined to believe that he was stretching the truth, but as the information poured out of Chapman, all skepticism evaporated. “All the evidence appears18 to prove his complete innocence affirmatively and conclusively,” wrote Stephens. “It is inconceivable [that], if he had revealed any part of the truth concerning his adventures in this country on the occasion of his previous visit, the Germans would have allowed him his freedom, still less have rewarded him with the very large sums of money which they paid him and even still less that they would now have sent him over once more.”

  There was a simple way to check whether he was telling the whole truth. MI5 knew he had been involved in training Björnsson and Júlíusson, but Chapman himself had no idea that the two hopeless Icelandic spies had been caught. If he volunteered information about the Icelanders without prompting, wrote Stephens, “it would be a first-rate check19 on his good faith.” Chapman did precisely that, offering a detailed account of the spies, their appearance and training, that tallied exactly with what his interrogators already knew. “I think this goes far20 to indicate that Chapman is playing straight,” wrote Stephens. Chapman was genuine; even the suicide potions he brought were the real thing—pills of potassium cyanide made by Laroche of Paris, and also in liquid form. “The only safe place21 for it is down the drain and well washed away,” concluded MI5’s scientific department.

  Another indication of Chapman’s good faith lay in the revelation that the Leica camera and £1,000 from the fund he had brought were intended for another German spy in Britain, “a man whom they22 undoubtedly believe to be one of the most valuable agents they have operating in this country.” Chapman’s spymasters had taken pains to ensure that he did not discover the name of this other spy. But MI5 knew it: His code name was Brutus.

  Roman Garby-Czerniawski, alias Armand Walenty, was a Polish fighter pilot who had operated a secret anti-Nazi group in France until he was captured by the Germans in 1941. After eight months in prison, the Germans believed that they had turned him, and allowed him to “escape”23 in order to forge a Polish fifth column in Britain. Garby-Czerniawski had turned himself in, and was now being operated, very successfully, as Double Agent Brutus.

  For some time, Garby-Czerniawski’s German handlers had been promising to supply him with more money and better photographic equipment. Shortly before Chapman landed, the Most Secret Sources had picked up an Abwehr message between Paris and Wiesbaden, which said that Fritz had been given “money and a Leica”24 to pass to “Hubert,” the German code name for Brutus. When Chapman announced that he was acting as a courier, he was merely confirming what MI5 already knew.

  Here was fresh evidence that Chapman was “safe.” But the supposed handover of the equipment from Zigzag to Brutus could pose a serious headache: It would require stage-managing and correlating not one but two separate streams of false information, and the two agents would be no longer be able to operate independently thereafter. “Zigzag will be given,25 and will have to appear to carry out, instructions which would link Zigzag to Brutus. It does not suit us to have these two agents linked, but it is going to be very difficult to avoid.”

  The extraordinary breadth of Chapman’s mission offered multiple opportunities for deceiving the Germans again, but MI5 was cautious. “Although no one thinks26 for a moment that [Chapman] might be double crossing us, if he is to be used for any form of deception, this issue must, of course, be placed beyond all possible doubt.”

  There were just two aspects of Chapman’s story that troubled the meticulous Stephens: Chapman’s loyalty to his German spymaster, von Gröning, the man he called Dr. Graumann, and Chapman’s relationship with Dagmar Lahlum.

  Chapman’s friendship with von Gröning had intensified in the intervening months, and Chapman’s loyalty to Britain might be tempered by his affection. “It must always be27 borne in mind that he had a very close connection and high regard for Graumann,” wrote Stephens. “He regards him as being anti-Nazi and liberal in his outlook.” Chapman was quick to defend Graumann, insisting that he was “a very able man,28 cautious and resourceful, but was handicapped by the poor material in the way of personnel that he had at his disposal.” He also pointed out that his spymaster’s sister ha
d adopted a Jewish child, although the more cynical heads in MI5 wondered whether, if true, this was simply “a form of insurance29 for the future.”

  Stephens had to consider the possibility that von Gröning and Chapman might be in league together. There was always something unknowable and fickle in Chapman’s makeup. The opportunist and the man of principle were one, as Stephens observed: “Chapman is a difficult subject30 and a certain percentage of his loyalties is still for Germany. One cannot escape the thought that, had Germany been winning the war, he could quite easily have stayed abroad. In England, he has no social standing; in Germany, among thugs, he is accepted. It is not easy to judge the workings of Chapman’s mind: he is bound to make comparisons between his life of luxury among the Germans, where he is almost a law unto himself, and his treatment here, where he still has the law to fear.” Those doubts were echoed by Len Burt, the head of Special Branch and the senior police officer liaising with MI5. On the basis of Chapman’s past record, Burt remained “quite convinced that31 Zigzag is a man without scruples who will blackmail anyone if he thinks it worth his while and will not stop even at selling out to the opposition if he thinks there is anything to be gained out of it.”

  The riddle could not be solved immediately. Chapman must be watched, his relationship with von Gröning probed: he should be handled with kid gloves. MI5 could not match the munificence of his Nazis handlers, but they could try: “Although we do not32 propose to and cannot supply him with champagne for his meals, this is the sort of thing with which we have to compete.”