Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  Von Gröning was privately amused to see the Führer mocked as a vegetable, but he took pains to remind Chapman that he was now part of a victorious German army that had conquered half of Europe and would soon bring Britain and Russia to their knees. Praetorius, as the most committed Nazi in the group, kept up a steady stream of Nazi jingoism.

  Inevitably, the combination of healthy living, good food, group bonding, and propaganda began to have the desired effect. Chapman felt himself drawn to what he called the “German spirit,”21 his vanity fed by the belief that this training school, staffed by hard and hard-drinking men, had been established for him alone. Every meal began with the chorus of “Heil Hitler22!” with the Englishman joining in. When Thomas declared that Britain was losing the war, Chapman believed him, though such “gloating” left him feeling “sick at heart.”

  At the end of a boozy evening, the trainee spy could be found lustily singing “Lili Marlene” with the rest of the crew. “Lili Marlene,” he declared, was his favorite song, expressing “the hopes of every man23 who has left his girl behind.”

  Chapman’s head was being turned by all the attention. But it was not turning nearly so far as von Gröning imagined.

  It is impossible to say when Chapman decided to start spying on his German spymasters. Many years later, he candidly admitted that he did not know quite when, or even why, he began to collect information. Perhaps he was merely taking out an insurance policy against an uncertain future. The instincts of the spy and the thief are not so different: both trade in stolen goods, on similar principles. The value of information depends on the buyer’s hunger, but it is a seller’s market. Slowly at first, and with great care, Chapman began to build up a stock of secrets that would be of supreme interest to British intelligence.

  He noticed the way that von Gröning assiduously read the personal advertisements in the Times, and sometimes the Manchester Guardian, occasionally underlining passages and taking notes. He overheard that Wojch had been on a sabotage mission to Spain during one of his unexplained absences, and when the door to the small anteroom off the study was left open, he spotted at least fifty pounds of gelignite in neat stacks. Inside a cupboard in von Gröning’s bedroom, he saw racks of German military uniforms “of every kind24 in different lockers with all kinds of numbers.” He noted how von Gröning took the codebooks after radio practice and carefully locked them in the safe. Given the opportunity and some gelignite, Chapman knew he could crack that safe.

  Chapman claimed to have manufactured a set of skeleton keys to open and snoop inside various locked drawers around the house. This seems unlikely, given how closely he was monitored, but he certainly eavesdropped on his companions, literally, by boring a small hole under the eaves of his bedroom into von Gröning’s bathroom. (If challenged, he planned to say he was putting down chemicals from the lab, to poison the rats that ran behind the paneling and kept him awake at night.) By pressing his ear to the hole, he could faintly hear the conversation taking place below, though he learned nothing of interest. He began to make notes: of crystal frequencies, code words, and the times of radio transmission between Nantes, Paris, and Bordeaux. He noted the position of the antiaircraft gun emplacements in the area, and the German military headquarters at the château on the other side of the river, camouflaged with netting. Although he had been instructed not to, he carefully wrote down the chemical formula of each bomb.

  As the training gathered pace, senior officials in the Abwehr began to take an interest in von Gröning’s protégé, and Chapman found himself being inspected and tested, like a prize specimen at a country fair. In May, Praetorius escorted him to an apartment in the rue de Luynes in Paris to meet a fat man with a red face, who drank champagne and told English jokes, but who asked a series of penetrating questions. From his demeanor, Chapman assumed he must be “a fairly high bug”25 in the organization. Von Gröning would say only that this individual was “one of our best men.”26

  Soon afterward, a German in civilian clothes arrived from Angers in a chauffeur-driven car. The stranger was extraordinarily ugly and quite bald, save for a fringe of hair at the back of his head, with discolored, gold-filled teeth. He wore a thick coat, carried a leather portfolio, and smoked cigars continuously. Von Gröning treated him with exaggerated respect. Chapman thought he looked “like a gigolo.”27 The bald man grilled Chapman about codes and sabotage. After he had left, Praetorius let slip that the visitor was “an old Gestapo man,”28 the head of counterespionage in western France, responsible for catching enemy spies with a team of radio interceptors working around the clock in shifts to pick up “black senders,”29 clandestine wireless operators sending messages to Britain. The Angers spy catcher had asked that Chapman be transferred to his team for a month, to act as a “stool pigeon amongst Allied agents in the Germans’ hands, and as a general aid in counter-espionage work”—a request von Gröning had indignantly refused. “Fritz” was his personal asset, and von Gröning was not about to relinquish him.

  In June 1942, Chapman was taken to Paris for his first real parachute jump. He would start at nine hundred feet, he was told, and gradually increase to fifteen hundred feet. After a night at the Grand Hotel and dinner at Poccardi’s Italian restaurant on the Left Bank, he was driven to a small airfield near Le Bourget airport, northeast of Paris, where Charles Lindbergh had landed after his transatlantic flight fifteen years earlier. Chapman and his parachute were loaded aboard a Junkers bomber, and minutes later he was floating down over the French countryside. His first jump was a complete success; his second, immediately afterward, was very nearly his last. The parachute failed to open properly, buckling in a gust of wind when he was fifty feet from the ground. He was swung high into the air, and then smashed down, face-first, onto the airfield tarmac. Chapman lost consciousness, one front tooth, one canine, and several molars. A German doctor patched him up. Back in Nantes, von Gröning sent him to the best local dentist, one Dr. Bijet, who set about reconstructing Chapman’s battered face. After two weeks of operations, Chapman had a natty new set of gold teeth to replace those he had lost, and the Abwehr had a bill for 9,500 francs. The expense of Chapman’s dental work would prompt the first of several heated exchanges between von Gröning and his Paris superiors.

  Chapman’s wireless skills steadily improved. Praetorius timed him with a stopwatch, and announced he had attained a speed of seventy-five letters a minute, using a hand cipher (as distinct from one encoded on the Enigma machine) based on a single code word: BUTTERMILK. Without the code word, Praetorius assured him, the code was “unbreakable.”30 As he gained in confidence, like most radio operators, Chapman began to develop his own “fist”—individual characteristics that another wireless operator or receiver could become familiar with. Chapman always ended his transmissions with a “laughing out” sign: “HE HU HO HA,” or some variation thereof. He called these flourishes “my little mottoes.”31

  Soon he graduated from the German transmitter to a radio of British manufacture, apparently seized from a British agent in France. Usually, the practice messages were coded from German, but he was also required to transmit in English and French. He sent poems, rhymes, proverbs, and sayings. One day, he tapped out a message: “It is very cold32 here but better than in Russia.” He sent Maurice, the long-suffering chief radio operator in Paris, a message asking him to buy Odette, their housekeeper, a wedding present on his behalf. A little while later, he tried out an English joke: “A man went33 into a shop and asked the price of the ties displayed. The customer was astonished when he heard the high price and said one could buy a pair of shoes for that price. You would look funny, said the shopkeeper, wearing a pair of shoes round your neck. Fritz.” It was not a good joke, but then the Paris operators seemed to have had no sense of humor at all. “What silly business34 is this?” the Paris station responded.

  As spring turned to summer, La Bretonnière was a place of quiet contentment, save for the occasional deafening explosion in the back garden. When neighbo
rs complained, they were told that the German engineers were detonating mines found during road construction. In July, von Gröning reported to Paris that Fritz had passed a series of tests, and was responding well to training. The chief of the Nantes spy school was enjoying himself. Managing La Bretonnière was a little like running an exclusive, intensely private men’s club, even if the guests were a trifle uncouth.

  Chapman was also happy. “I had everything35 I wanted,” he reflected. He also had a new companion. On a black-market expedition in the countryside, Chapman had bought and adopted a young pig, which he christened Bobby. The name was probably a reference to his previous life. The British bobbies (also, less affectionately, referred to as “pigs”) had chased Chapman for years; now Bobby the Pig followed him everywhere. An intelligent and affectionate animal, Bobby lived in the grounds of the house. At Chapman’s whistle, he would come running, like a well-trained dog, and then lie with his trotters in the air to have his stomach scratched. When Chapman went swimming in the Erdre (von Gröning had by now relaxed his rules on unaccompanied bathing), Bobby would join him, flopping around in the muddy shallows. Then the Englishman and his faithful pig would walk happily home together through the cowslips and yellow irises.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Codebreakers

  IN THE SUMMER of 1942, the analysts of Bletchley Park—the secret code and cipher center hidden deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside—decoded one of the most bizarre messages of the entire war. It had been sent from the Abwehr station at Nantes to the Abwehr headquarters in Paris, and it read: “Dear France.1 Your friend Bobby the Pig grows fatter every day. He is gorging now like a king, roars like a lion and shits like an elephant. Fritz.” (The refined codebreaking ladies of Bletchley did not hold with vulgarity; they substituted the word “shits” with a series of asterisks.) Britain’s wartime cipher experts had penetrated Nazi Germany’s most sophisticated codes and read its most secret messages, but this one was, quite simply, incomprehensible.

  For several months, Britain’s codebreakers and spy catchers had been following the Fritz traffic with avid interest and mounting anxiety. They knew when this new, highly prized German spy had arrived in Nantes, and when he went to Paris. They knew how many teeth he had knocked out, and what the dentistry had cost. They knew he spoke English, and that he might even be an Englishman. And they knew he was heading for Britain.

  The unraveling of Germany’s top secret codes by a peculiar collection of mathematical savants in an English country house was perhaps the most spectacular espionage coup of this, or any other, war. The Radio Security Service began picking up Abwehr signals in August 1940. The wireless set and codes obtained through Arthur Owens, “Agent Snow,” had provided the codebreakers with a valuable head start, and the cryptographers at Bletchley Park (“Station X”) were soon reading the Abwehr’s principal hand cipher, the old-fashioned manual code. By December another team, under the leadership of the inspirationally eccentric Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, had also broken the code used on Abwehr Enigma machines, the portable German cipher machine used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. From that moment until the end of the war, British intelligence continuously intercepted and read the wireless traffic of the German secret service.

  One member of the team put the success down to “brilliant guesswork2 and a good slice of luck,” but it also came through the application of raw intellectual muscle and sheer hard work. The Abwehr’s messages had to be intercepted, sent to Bletchley Park, sorted, distributed, the daily machine and message settings worked out, and finally deciphered and dispatched to the intelligence services. This extraordinary feat was usually performed by Dilly Knox and his team of large ladies (for some reason he employed only women, and only tall ones) within twenty-four hours. Knox himself frequently went about his work clad in pajamas and dressing gown; to relax, he would then go for a terrifyingly fast drive in the country lanes around Bletchley. Knox was one of the greatest cryptographers, and the worst drivers, Britain has ever produced. One day, he returned from motoring through the countryside and remarked casually: “It’s amazing how people smile,3 and apologize to you, when you knock them over.”

  The successful deciphering of the secret German codes, code named Ultra, was the best-kept secret of the war. Its value to the war effort was almost incalculable. Churchill called the intercepts “My Golden Eggs”4 and guarded them jealously. The Abwehr never suspected that its messages were being read on a daily basis, and persisted in the mistaken belief that its codes were unbreakable. The wealth of intelligence produced by Ultra decrypts was referred to only as the “Most Secret Sources.”

  For the purposes of counterespionage, the Most Secret Sources gave early warning of which spies were arriving in Britain, where, and when. As a consequence, most of the “invasion spies” were picked up the moment they arrived in Britain and swiftly imprisoned. Several were executed. The Abwehr’s attempt to build a wartime spy network in Britain was an unmitigated failure. Crucially, the German intelligence service never realized this, thanks to one soldier, one Oxford academic, and one inspired idea.

  At the height of the invasion scare, Colonel Tommy Robertson, the MI5 officer who had handled the Snow case, approached his commanding officer, Dick White, and pointed out an obvious truth: A dead enemy spy can do no more harm, but neither can he (or she) do any good. A captured spy, however, could be persuaded to double-cross his German employers in exchange for his life, and then work for his British captors. Snow had already demonstrated the potential value of the controlled double agent, who could persuade the enemy to believe he was active and loyal when he was nothing of the sort. More important, over time, the double agent could be used to feed vital disinformation to the enemy. Thanks to the Most Secret Sources, British intelligence could even check whether the ruse was working. Robertson was insistent: Instead of putting enemy agents in prison or on the end of a rope, MI5 should put them to work.

  Robertson’s suggestion was forwarded to Guy Liddell, the subtle-minded, cello-playing director of “B Division,” the branch of MI5 devoted to counterintelligence. Liddell gave his blessing at once, and, with cabinet approval, Robertson was duly appointed chief of a new section for catching enemy spies, turning them, and then running them as double agents. The new outfit was given the innocuously invisible name B1A. At the same time, another linked organization was established, with senior representatives of all the military intelligence services, the Home Forces and Home Defence, to assess the information, true and false, to be sent back via the double agents. This was named the “Twenty Committee,” because the two Xs of a double cross make the number “twenty” in Roman numerals. This was precisely the sort of dry classical witticism favored by the man now appointed chairman of the Twenty Committee: Major (and later Sir) John Cecil Masterman, a distinguished Oxford history don, all-around sportsman, successful thriller writer, and jailbird.

  Masterman and Robertson formed the linchpins of the double-cross operation, and they ran it with such dazzling success that after the war Masterman could justifiably claim: “By means of the double-cross5 agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.” (The italics are his, and deserved.) Theirs was a partnership of equals, and opposites: Robertson was a professional, dealing with the nuts and bolts of running the double agents, while Masterman liaised with the top brass. Robertson was the technician, while Masterman was to become the great theoretician of the double cross.

  Thomas Argyll Robertson was universally known as “Tar,” on account of his initials. Born in Sumatra to colonial parents, Tar had spent much of childhood parked with an aunt in Tunbridge Wells, an experience that was lonely but formative, for it left him with an ability to chat to complete strangers with disarming frankness. He passed through Charterhouse and Sandhurst without, in his own estimation, learning very much, and became, briefly, an officer in the Seaforth Highlanders, and then, even more briefly, a bank clerk. In 1933, at the age of twenty-four, at the
invitation of Vernon Kell, the first director general of MI5, he had given up the staid world of banking to become a full-time intelligence officer, initially dealing with political subversion, arms trafficking, and counterespionage. “Immensely personable6 and monstrously good looking,” in the words of Christopher Harmer, a fellow officer, he had the rare knack of being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, about anything. Bishops, admirals, whores, crooks, and revolutionaries all found it equally easy to confide in Tar Robertson. Masterman pointed out, a touch acidulously, that “Tar was in no sense7 an intellectual.” Tar was no bookworm. Instead, he read people. He excelled in a job that “involved a great deal8 of conversing with suspect people in pubs…meeting, greeting, chatting, charming, chuckling, listening, offering another drink, observing, probing a little, listening some more and ending up with all sorts of confidences the other person never thought he would utter.” He continued to wear the distinctive McKenzie tartan trews of the Seaforth Highlanders, a strangely conspicuous choice of attire for someone running one of the most secret organizations in the world. (The tartan trousers earned him another, more appropriately colorful nickname: “Passion Pants.”9)

  John Masterman was cut from very different cloth. It is easiest to imagine him as the antithesis, in every conceivable way, of Eddie Chapman. He was highly intellectual, intensely conventional, and faintly priggish, with a granite sense of moral duty. Masterman was the embodiment of the British establishment: He belonged to all the right clubs, and played tennis at Wimbledon, hockey for England, and cricket whenever possible. Spare and athletic, he had a hard and handsome face, as if carved out of marble. He neither smoked nor drank, and lived in a world of High Tables and elevated scholarship, exclusively inhabited by wealthy, privileged, intelligent English men.