Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  The next few hours passed in a miasmic rush of fear and movement: the port at Saint-Malo in the chill dawn; two hours handcuffed to a bench in the police station, where a gendarme slipped them a baguette and some stale cheese; locked inside a compartment on the train to Paris; and finally, arrival at the Gare du Nord, where a military truck and armed escort awaited them. The German guards would not speak and shrugged off every question. Faramus was white with terror, moaning gently, his head in his hands, as they sped through the broad boulevards of the occupied French capital with their silent Gestapo escort. Finally, the truck passed through a broad gateway with iron gates draped in huge ringlets of barbed wire, and into another prison.

  In the weeks before Chapman’s arrest, several telephone wires on the island had been cut, the latest in a series of acts of sabotage. The German authorities consulted the Jersey police, some of whom were now active collaborators, and they immediately pointed the finger at Chapman and Faramus, the most notorious of the usual suspects. Chapman reflected ruefully: “The British police8 told them that if there was any trouble, I was probably in it.”

  For the young criminal, this was an entirely new experience. He had been arrested for a crime he had not committed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Romainville

  THE FORT DE ROMAINVILLE glowers over the eastern suburbs of Paris. A brutal stone giant, by 1941 it had been made into another Nazi vision of hell. Built in the 1830s on a low hill, the hulking bastion was part of the defensive ring constructed around Paris to protect the city from foreign attack, but it also held troops who could be deployed in the event of popular insurrection—a bloated, moated, impregnable monstrosity. For the Nazis, the ancient fort served a similar psychological purpose—as a hostage camp, a place of interrogation, torture, and summary execution, and a visible symbol of intimidation, inescapable in every way. Romainville was “death’s waiting room,” a prison for civilians—resistance fighters, political prisoners, prominent Jews, Communists and intellectuals, suspected spies, political subversives, and “trouble-makers,” as well as those who had simply failed to show sufficient deference to the new rulers of France.

  This shifting prison population formed an important element in the brutal arithmetic of Nazi occupation, for in reprisal for each act of resistance, a number of prisoners would be selected from the cells and shot. An attack on German soldiers at the Rex Cinema in Paris, for example, was calculated to be worth the lives of 116 Romainville hostages. The more serious the incident of defiance, the higher the death toll at the hostage depot. Sometimes, hostages were told which specific act had cost them their lives. Mostly, they were not.

  Chapman and Faramus, political prisoners and suspected saboteurs, were stripped, clad in prison overalls, and then taken before the camp commandant, Kapitän Brüchenbach, a stocky little man with thick glasses and eyes “like two bullet holes in a metal door.” Brüchenbach grunted that he had orders from the Gestapo to detain them until further notice. The fastidious Faramus noted that the man “stank of drink.”1

  They were then marched to a barracks building surrounded by a twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, and guarded at either end by sentries with searchlights and machine guns. The men were pushed into a room, unheated and lit by a single bulb, containing half a dozen empty bunks, and locked inside. As they lay on rotting straw mattresses, the friends discussed their chances of survival. One voiced brittle optimism, the other was sunk in deepest despair.

  “How would you2 like to be shot, Eddie?” asked Faramus.

  “I don’t think I’d mind so terribly as all that,” came the self-deluding reply. “I’ve had a pretty good life.”

  The next morning, as they filed into the courtyard, Chapman and Faramus learned from the whispers of their fellow prisoners that sixteen people had been executed that morning, in retaliation for the assassination of a German officer in Nantes by members of the resistance. On the door of each cell was a warning: “Alles Verboten”3 (everything is forbidden). This was no exaggeration. The writing and receiving of letters was not permitted. Red Cross and Quaker parcels were intercepted. The beatings were ferocious, and unexplained. Denied contact with the world outside, the inmates measured time by the movements of the guards and the traffic in the distant Paris streets. Rations were strict and unvarying: a pint of watery vegetable soup, four ounces of black bread, and an ounce of rancid margarine or cheese. At first, the two newcomers fished the maggots out of the soup; after a few days, they, like everyone else, sucked it all down.

  The male and female inmates were allowed to mix in the fort’s giant courtyard, but sexual relations were strictly forbidden, as one of the guards made clear on their first day with an elaborate, multilingual charade: “Madame prisonniers.4 Parler, promenade, ja! Aber NIX, verboten, fig-fig—Nix!” And then, in case of any lingering confusion on the matter, he added: “NIX. Keine fig-fig!” To Chapman, this sounded like a challenge.

  The inmates of Fort Romainville were a peculiar assortment: rich and poor, brave and treacherous, guilty and innocent. Chapman and Faramus were the only Englishmen. There was Paulette, a blond woman who had been arrested for espionage, and Ginette, whose husband had already been executed for spying. Other women were being held as hostages for husbands or fathers who had joined the Free French, or were known to be active in the resistance. There was Kahn, a wealthy German-Jewish banker, along with Michelin—the tire magnate—two Belgian diamond merchants, and a mysterious individual called Leutsch, a German-speaking Swiss journalist who wore horn-rimmed spectacles and claimed to have worked for British intelligence. Among the French prisoners were the former minister of information and a radio journalist named Le François, jailed for refusing to broadcast German propaganda. One woman, a waitress from a café in Montparnasse, was there, she claimed, because she had slapped an SS officer who had fondled her. One old fellow named Weiss, a multilingual eccentric who suffered from hydrophobia, had been arrested for writing an article discussing how a defeated Germany should be partitioned. Many had simply fallen foul of the invaders. Some claimed to have no idea why they were there.

  Every inmate had a different story, yet all guarded their words; some declined to reveal their identities beyond a first name. For the prison was also riddled with informers, stool pigeons whose task it was to draw out the truth from spies and agitators, and then expose them. Among the inmates, suspicion fell heavily on a Belgian named Bossuet. He claimed to have been born in Cardiff, and could speak English well, though laced with slang. At first, Chapman had warmed to the Belgian, only to be told that Bossuet was a “professional denouncer,”5 a mouchard, who had earned himself the nickname “Black Diamond.” It was rumored that his betrayals had sent twenty-two prisoners to their deaths. Most inmates shunned him, and some attacked him when the guards were not looking. Eventually, Bossuet was removed from the prison. This was seen as proof of Bossuet’s guilt, but it was part of the regime of neurosis at Romainville that prisoners arrived and were removed without warning or explanation. A middle-aged man called Dreyfus, a Jewish descendant of the other famous victim of anti-Semitism, was briefly held, and then inexplicably released. Immediately, it was assumed that he must have turned traitor. “It wasn’t safe to talk6 to anyone,” Chapman reflected. “No one knew who was who. No one would talk.”

  Yet alongside the corrosive atmosphere of fear and distrust existed an equally powerful urge for intimacy. The ban on sex between prisoners was not just ignored, but violated with abandon. Men and women sought every opportunity: in the washrooms, under the stairs, in the coal store and the darker corners of the courtyard. The barracks rooms had not been designed as cells, and the locks were simple to pick. Elaborate plans were hatched by the inmates to find sexual release. No one ever escaped from Romainville, but here was a way to escape, briefly. Within weeks of arriving in Romainville, Chapman had paired off with the blond Paulette, who was some ten years his senior, while Faramus had begun a sexual relationship with another female inmate named Lucy. L
ooking back, both men certainly exaggerated the extent of their “conquests.” Chapman, more worldly than his partner, seemed to accept the strange merging of sex and fear as the natural order, but Faramus, a sexual ingenue, was insistent that these “were real love affairs,7 passionate and sincere.” In this closed and treacherous society, where death came without warning or explanation, sexual expression was the only remaining liberty.

  While Chapman and Faramus were devising complicated trysts with the female prisoners, their offer to spy for Germany, now long forgotten by them, was slowly progressing through the German military bureaucracy. From Jersey, their letter had passed to Berlin, then on to the branch of the German secret service at Hamburg, then back to Jersey again. Chapman was serving two weeks’ solitary confinement in the fort dungeons when the letter finally caught up with him, in December 1941. Chapman had been consigned to the cachots, the underground cells, after a fight with the hated Bossuet.

  Prisoners in solitary received one meal of bread and soup every three days. Chapman’s cell was lightless, freezing, and sodden. In an effort to conserve his body heat, he scraped the gravel from the floor and tried to cover himself with it.

  Chapman was a week into his sentence in solitary when he was pulled from the dungeon, escorted under guard to Brüchenbach’s office, and locked in a back room. Moments later, he was confronted by an SS officer, who carefully locked the door behind him. The visitor was tall and spare, with pale blue eyes and hollow cheeks streaked with broken red veins. He stood looking at Chapman for several moments before he spoke. Then, in perfect English, without a hint of accent, he introduced himself as Oberleutnant Walter Thomas. Without preamble or explanation, he sat down at a desk and began to interrogate Chapman about his past crimes, his experience with explosives, his imprisonment in Jersey, and his proficiency in German. Occasionally, he referred to a file. He seemed to know every detail of Chapman’s criminal record, not only the crimes for which he had been sentenced, but those for which he was only suspected. The officer spoke with familiarity of Britain, of Chapman’s years in Soho, his arrest in Edinburgh, and his flight to Jersey; as he spoke, he twined the long fingers of his hands or gesticulated. His expression did not change, but he seemed satisfied by Chapman’s answers. Chapman reflected later that his interrogator seemed “the scholarly, staid”8 type. After an hour, the man indicated that the meeting was over, and Chapman was escorted from the office, not back to the punishment dungeon, but to the barracks room.

  “What happened?”9 Faramus asked, astonished by Chapman’s early release from solitary.

  Chapman swore him to secrecy and then described his encounter with the SS officer. It must mean, he continued, that their offer to work for Germany had provoked a response at last. “All right for you,”10 said Faramus, suddenly fearful. “They’re sure to make use of you. But what about me? What am I worth to them?” Chapman tried to reassure the younger man, but both knew Faramus was right. The Nazis might conceivably find use for a fit, wily, and experienced criminal, with a long record and a convincing reason for hating the British establishment. But what use could the Third Reich find for a slight, twenty-year-old hairdresser whose sole crime had been a failed attempt to acquire £9 by deceit?

  Further evidence of the Nazis’ interest in Chapman surfaced a few days later, in the form of a military photographer with a Leica camera, who took dozens of pictures of the prisoner, full face and in profile, and then departed.

  In early January 1942, Chapman was once more summoned to the commandant’s office. This time, his interrogator could not have been more different from the dead-eyed Oberleutnant Thomas. Arranged across the commandant’s armchair was a vision of female loveliness; with large brown eyes, long red-painted fingernails, and an expensive black lamb’s-wool coat by her side, she looked, to Chapman’s mind, as if she had just stepped off a film set. Chapman was momentarily stunned by the apparition. Standing alongside her was a man in civilian clothes. Chapman noted his athletic physique and suntanned face; with their elegant apparel and faintly bored expressions, they might have been modeling for a fashion shoot.

  The man asked questions in German, which the woman translated into English, with an American accent. There was no attempt to disguise why they had come. Chapman was peppered with questions about what work he thought he could do for the German secret service, and his motives for offering to do so. They demanded to know how much he expected to be paid, and what he would be prepared to do if sent back to Britain undercover. The woman smoked cigarette after cigarette from a long black holder. “Supposing you didn’t feel like coming back11 to us?” she asked suddenly.

  “You’d have to trust12 me,” Chapman replied.

  As the woman picked up her coat to leave, Chapman spotted the label inside: Schiaparelli, the Italian designer. Clearly, he reflected, Nazi spies—if that is what this couple were—could afford the height of fashion.

  For a few weeks, normal prison routine resumed, broken only by the ferocious RAF bombardment of the huge Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, directly across the Seine from Romainville. The factory was now part of the Nazi munitions machine, making lorries for the German army. On March 3, the RAF launched 235 low-level bombers at the plant, the largest number of aircraft aimed at a single target during the war. From the barracks windows, Chapman and Faramus saw flares, tracers, and flak light up the night, felt the crump of explosive tremble through air, and watched as the city sky turned an evil orange. Chapman could sense his companion’s fear. “They’ll probably send you13 to a civilian internee camp,” he said. “Or maybe keep you here—if they accept me. Listen Tony, don’t worry: leave it to me. Trust me.”

  The two Englishmen had been in Romainville for almost four months when Chapman was taken to Brüchenbach’s office for what would be the last time. Waiting for him was Oberleutnant Thomas, but this time accompanied by a more senior officer, dressed in the uniform of a cavalry Rittmeister, the equivalent of a captain. At his throat he wore the Iron Cross. Oberleutnant Thomas introduced him as “Herr Doktor Stephan Graumann.” With an almost courtly gesture, Graumann invited Chapman to be seated, and then began to interrogate him in precise, old-fashioned English, in a soft voice with an upper-class British accent. He asked how Chapman had been treated in Romainville. When the Englishman described his time in the cachots on Brüchenbach’s orders, Graumann sneered and remarked that the commandant was “simply a trained brute.”14

  Graumann had a lofty yet benevolent air, and Chapman found himself warming to the man. Graumann often smiled to himself, as if enjoying a private joke. He would consider Chapman’s answers carefully, leaning back in his chair, the index finger of one hand hooked into the side pocket of his uniform, the other stroking his thinning hair. From time to time, he would don thick-rimmed spectacles and peer at the open file in front of him. Chapman decided he must be “a man of understanding15 and tolerance.”

  Graumann quizzed Chapman once more about his past: his catalog of crimes, his grasp of German and French, the members of the Jelly Gang and their current whereabouts. Time after time, he returned to the question of whether Chapman was motivated more by hatred of Britain or by the promise of financial gain. Chapman responded that both were factors in his desire to spy for Germany. The interrogation continued for three hours.

  Finally, Graumann fixed Chapman with his watery blue eyes and came to the point. If Chapman would agree to be trained in sabotage, wireless telegraphy, and intelligence work and then undertake a mission to Britain, he could promise him a substantial financial reward on his return. Chapman agreed on the spot. He then asked whether Tony Faramus would be coming too. Graumann’s reply was blunt. Faramus was “no use”16 to the German secret service. Graumann picked his words carefully: “In times of war17 we must be careful, and one of you must remain here.” Though his language was opaque, Graumann’s meaning was obvious: Faramus would remain behind, as a hostage for Chapman’s good behavior.

  As they shook hands, Chapman noticed
the fat gold ring with five black dots on Graumann’s little finger, and remarked to himself on the softness of his hands. These were hands that had never known manual labor. The voice, the hands, the signet ring: clearly, the man must be some sort of aristocrat. If Chapman could avoid getting into any more trouble, Graumann remarked from the doorway, he would be out of Romainville in two weeks.

  Chapman returned to his barracks cell elated, but also troubled by the veiled “half-threat”18 to Faramus. He did not relate the German’s words to his cellmate, but the news that Chapman would soon be leaving alone left the younger man in no doubt that his position was perilous. “Supposing you slip up,”19 Faramus pointed out. “Then I’ll be the one to get it in the neck. What if once you have set foot in England, you don’t want to come back, Eddie? I don’t fancy being shot. Besides, I’m too young to die.”

  Chapman tried to reassure him. “Look here, Tony, let me play this my way. I am gambling with my own life, too, don’t forget.” The truth of the remark was undeniable: Their fates were now linked. Most Romainville victims never discovered why they had been chosen for death. If Faramus was shot, he would know he had been betrayed by Eddie Chapman. Privately, Faramus reflected that “agreeing to play Eddie’s game might cost me my life.” Could this “bold bluff” possibly succeed? “Desperately and fearfully,” Faramus wrote, “I hoped so, for my sake as well as his.”

  On April 18, 1942, Chapman was escorted from his cell. “Goodbye and good luck,”20 he said, slapping Faramus on the back and grinning. “Look me up in London after the war!”

  “Goodbye and good luck,” replied the Jerseyman, as brightly as he could.

  Chapman was met in the commandant’s office by Oberleutnant Thomas. The few possessions he had brought from Jersey were returned to him, along with his civilian clothes, while Brüchenbach signed the release papers. Chapman walked out of the Romainville gates and was ushered by Thomas into a waiting car. He was free. But as Thomas observed, as they settled into the backseat and the driver headed west, this was freedom of a very particular sort. “You are among friends21 and we are going to help you,” said the German officer, in his clipped, precise English. “So please do not try anything silly like attempting to escape, because I am armed.” From now on, Thomas added, when in public, Chapman should speak only German.