Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  A confirmed bachelor, he might have been homosexual, but if so, in a wholly repressed and contented English way. Women were simply invisible to him; in the 384 pages of his autobiography, only one woman is mentioned with affection, and that is his mother, with whom he lived in Eastbourne during the university vacations. In his spare time, he wrote detective thrillers set in an imaginary Oxford college and starring an amateur British sleuth in the Sherlock Holmes mold. These are somewhat dry and unemotional books, more intellectual puzzles than novels, but that was how this clever, desiccated man regarded human nature—as a conundrum to be unpicked by reason. He seems a peculiar creature today, but John Masterman represented English traits that were once considered virtues: noblesse oblige, hard work, and unquestioning obedience to the norms of society. By his own account, he was “almost obsessively anxious10 to conform to accepted standards,” just as Chapman was equally determined to defy them.

  Yet Masterman had one thing in common with Chapman: He had spent four years in a prison. By a stroke of terrible ill fortune, as a newly elected fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1914, he was sent on a study course in Germany, and was trapped by the outbreak of the First World War. Masterman was interned in Ruhleben prison with a strange assortment of equally unlucky Britons: sailors, businessmen, academics, jockeys from the Berlin racecourse, sportsmen, workmen, tourists, and one Nobel Prize winner, Sir James Chadwick, who lectured his fellow prisoners on the mysteries of radioactivity. The young Masterman emerged after four years without visible scars, but he was weighed down by what he considered to be an inferiority complex. Almost all his friends and contemporaries had perished on the battlefields. “My predominant feeling11 was one of shame,” he wrote. “I had played no part in the greatest struggle in our national history.”

  Masterman was already in his fiftieth year when the longed-for opportunity to play his part finally arrived with the offer to work in MI5. He seized it gratefully, and it was Britain’s great good fortune that he did, for no man was better suited to the job. If Tar Robertson was the “real genius”12 of the double-cross system, as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, then John Masterman was its moral conscience, meticulously analyzing the motivations of men, patiently solving the riddle of the double cross, like a vast and complicated crossword puzzle.

  Recruitment to MI5 was through the informal old-boy network, and Robertson, with the help of his deputy, a London solicitor named John Marriott, swiftly began putting together a team of gifted amateurs. Section B1A, when finally assembled, included lawyers, academics, an industrialist, a circus owner, at least one artist, an art dealer, and a poet. Tar himself was the only professional in the organization, which started its life in a requisitioned corner of Wormwood Scrubs prison before moving to a large and elegant house at 58 St. James’s Street, in the heart of Mayfair. The team’s in-house poet, Cyril Harvey, memorialized the building in camp verse:

  At 58, St James’s Street13

  The door is open wide

  Yet all who seek to enter here

  Must make their motives crystal clear

  Before they step inside,

  That none may probe with fell intent

  The Secrets of the Government.

  Intercepted German spies were first interrogated at a secret military prison in West London, Camp 020. Only then, if suitable for double-agent work, would they be handed over to Tar Robertson and his case officers. If they refused to collaborate, they were either imprisoned or executed. Sometimes the death threat was overt. Masterman was unsentimental on this score. “Some had to perish,14 both to satisfy the public that the security of the country was being maintained, and also to convince the Germans that the others were working properly and were not under control.” All but the most fanatical Nazis agreed to cooperate when faced with this choice, but their motives did not follow any established pattern. Some were merely terrified, desperate to save their skins, but there were also, Masterman found, “certain persons who15 have a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and who attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other, so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied.”

  If the intercepted spy was considered suitable, then the hard work began, starting with a strenuous exercise of the imagination. In Masterman’s words, the case officer must penetrate the world of his adopted spy, to “see with the eyes16 and hear with the ears of his agent,” and create for him a life as close as possible to the one he was pretending to live. If, say, the double agent was claiming to transmit from Aylesbury, then he needed to know what Aylesbury was like and, if possible, to be physically in or very near Aylesbury, since it was suspected that the Germans could pinpoint transmissions, perhaps to within a one-mile radius.

  The logistical challenge was immense. Each double agent required a safe house and a staff of at least five people: a case officer, a wireless operator to monitor or transmit his messages, two guards on twelve-hour shifts to ensure he did not run away, and a trusted housekeeper to look after and feed the group. Meanwhile, the case officer had to establish what his agent had been sent to find out, and then reproduce a fake facsimile of it, but without damaging the war effort. An agent who transmitted useless information would be seen as a failure by the Abwehr, and dropped. To maintain German confidence, the double agent must send a mixture of true but essentially harmless information known as “chicken feed,” extraneous facts, and undetectably false tidbits, along with whatever disinformation was agreed upon.

  Deciding what could or could not be sent to the enemy was the delicate task of the Twenty Committee. Meanwhile, the double agent must be kept busy and happy, because if he turned bad, and somehow managed to inform his German spymasters that he was under British control, then the entire system would be jeopardized. Every double agent, Masterman observed, “is prone to be vain,17 moody and introspective, and therefore idleness, which begets brooding, should be of all things most carefully avoided.” Tar Robertson swiftly discovered that in order to keep these agents sweet, it was sensible to reward them, and not just with their lives. The “principle of generosity”18 was thus established, and agents who had brought over cash, as many did, were often allowed to keep a percentage.

  The ideal case officer needed to be a combination of guard, friend, psychologist, radio technician, paymaster, entertainments organizer, and private nursemaid. It helped if he or she was also a saint, since the individual being cosseted and coaxed in this way was quite likely to be extremely unpleasant, greedy, paranoid, treacherous, and, at least initially, an enemy of Britain. Finally, all of the above had to be performed at breakneck speed, because the longer a spy took to make contact with the enemy, the more likely his German spymaster would suspect that he had been captured and turned.

  The results show just how brilliantly Tar Robertson chose the men and women “of high intelligence19 and clearly defined purpose” who made up his team. Some 480 suspected enemy spies were detained in Britain in the course of the war. Just 77 of these were German. The rest were, in descending order of magnitude, Belgian, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, and then just about every conceivable race and nationality, including several who were stateless. After 1940, very few were British. Of the total intercepted, around a quarter were subsequently used as double agents, of whom perhaps 40 made a significant contribution. Some of these lasted only a short time before their cases were terminated; a few continued to delude their German handlers until the end of the war. A tiny handful, the very best, were involved in the greatest strategic deception of all, Operation Fortitude, by which the Germans were persuaded to believe that the Allied invasion of France would be concentrated on the Pas de Calais, and not Normandy.

  As early as 1942, Tar Robertson’s team could be justly proud of its efforts. Scores of spies had been rounded up with the aid of the Most Secret Sources, and many had been recruited as double agents. Yet the B1A team remained in a state of deep anxiety, beset by the pos
sibility that a spy could slip through the mesh, attempt to contact an agent already operating in Britain, discover that he was being controlled, and then blow the entire double-cross network.

  Those fears were exacerbated when the body of a man named Englebertus Fukken, alias William Ter Braak, was discovered in Cambridge. A Dutch agent, Ter Braak had parachuted into Britain in November 1940. Five months later, after running out of money, he had climbed into a public air-raid shelter and shot himself in the head with his German pistol. If Ter Braak could survive undetected in Britain for so long, then other German agents must be at large. Masterman voiced the nagging fear of every wartime spy catcher: “We were obsessed by the idea that there might be a large body of spies over and above those whom we controlled.”

  Moreover, MI5 could not ignore the exceptionally low grade of the spies it had caught. Indeed, the level of ineptitude among the captured spies was such that some in the intelligence service wondered if they were being deliberately planted as decoys: “Could any intelligence service,20 let alone one run by the super-efficient Germans, be so incompetent?” wondered Ewen Montagu, the naval intelligence officer on the Twenty Committee. Perhaps the Germans were training up a troop of superspies to follow the dubious duds they had sent over to date. Perhaps an altogether better class of spy was already lurking undetected in Britain?

  Tar Robertson’s spy hunters therefore pricked up their ears when, early in February 1942, a reference to a hitherto unknown agent, code-named Fritz, was picked up by British interceptors, decoded by Bletchley Park, and passed on to the intelligence services. To judge from the intercepts, the Germans were taking a great deal of trouble over Fritz, who was also referred to as “C,” and sometimes as “E.” In May, the Paris branch of the Abwehr was instructed to buy a new set of clothes for Fritz. The following week, Nantes demanded a new wireless set from the stocks of captured British equipment. In June, the listeners discovered, some 9,500 francs had been spent on his teeth, damaged during a failed parachute jump—more money than most German spies were allocated for an entire mission.

  The Nantes Abwehr began to refer to Fritz as Fritzchen, the diminutive form of the name, suggesting a certain intimacy with this new recruit. From the Most Secret Sources, it appeared that Stephan von Gröning, already identified by British intelligence as head of the Nantes Abwehr branch, was particularly taken with Fritz. In June, he boasted to Paris that Fritz could “now prepare sabotage material21 unaided.” In July, he insisted that Fritz was utterly loyal, declaring that “any connection with the enemy22 is out of the question.” Paris, more skeptical, replied by wondering if the word “not” had been accidentally omitted from von Gröning’s message.

  Meanwhile, the Radio Security Service reported that Fritz, plainly a novice wireless operator, was practicing Morse from the Nantes Abwehr branch, using a variation of the Vigenère code known as Gronsfeld. At first, his transmissions had been clumsy, and when he tried to transmit faster he merely succeeded “in making corrupt characters23 and in fumbling,” but he was improving rapidly. “When he arrives24 in this country,” the Radio Security Service reported, “he will send his messages in English.” After listening to Fritz “practically every day25 for several weeks,” the interceptor had “learned to recognise26 his unmistakable style and to record its peculiarities,” the telltale “fist.” His messages sometimes ended with a cheery “73,” shorthand for “Best regards,” or “FF,” meaning “Is my message decipherable?”27 He routinely signed off with the laughing sign “HU HU HA HO,” then the insulting “99,” meaning “go to hell,” or words to that effect. Fritz was turning into a first-rate radio operator, even if his messages were rather peculiar, and sometimes positively offensive.

  By late summer, MI5 had assembled a thick dossier on Fritz. But they still did not know his real name, his mission, or the date and time of his planned arrival in Britain. And as for the identity of this shadowy associate nicknamed Bobby the Pig, with the regal appetite and the elephantine toilet habits, that, too, remained a mystery.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Mosquito

  ONE MORNING, VON GRÖNING handed Chapman a gun: a shiny American Colt revolver, with a loaded chamber. Chapman had never held a gun before. When he asked why he needed this weapon, von Gröning replied vaguely that he might want it “to shoot his way out1 of any difficulties he might encounter.” Leo taught him how to aim and fire it, using a target erected in the grounds of La Bretonnière, and claimed he soon could hit a franc coin from fifty feet away.

  The revolver was just one sign of von Gröning’s growing trust. The cadaverous Praetorius no longer shadowed Chapman’s every step, and he was allowed to take walks alone with Bobby, though instructed to remain close to the villa. He was permitted to move out of his top-floor room (having carefully disguised the holes in the wainscoting) and into a bedroom in the gardener’s cottage, so that he could practice mixing explosives and incendiary mixtures in the laboratory whenever he desired. The homemade bombs were getting bigger and more sophisticated. He practiced making underwater fuses and tossing them into the duck pond. There were various tree stumps on the grounds, and Chapman was encouraged to try blowing them up. On one occasion, he packed too much dynamite into a large oak stump, which exploded with such force that chunks of burning wood were blasted into the garden of the house next door, narrowly missing a neighbor. Von Gröning was livid. Chapman was not quite the explosives expert he thought he was. While he was attempting to construct a sulfuric acid fuse, the volatile mixture exploded, burning his hand, singeing off a hank of hair, and covering his face with smut. A French doctor bandaged the hand, and Chapman took to his bed. “I was suffering more2 from shock than anything,” he wrote later.

  Visitors continued to arrive at La Bretonnière, some to inspect Chapman’s progress, others to talk to von Gröning or to undergo training. One of these was a Frenchman referred to only as “Pierre,” a collaborator with round glasses who, in Chapman’s words, “made all the right3 Heil Hitler noises.” Pierre belonged to a Breton separatist group, Bretagne Pour les Bretons, and he was undergoing training as a fifth columnist in case an Allied invasion forced a German withdrawal. On another occasion, Chapman was allowed to be present during a meeting with two men, one of whom was introduced as “Monsieur Ferdinand”4 and the other a lad of about eighteen, who appeared quite petrified. These were members of a Gaullist cell, apparently planning to leave France via an established escape route and to join the Free French in London. Monsieur Ferdinand, it seemed, was prepared to smuggle Chapman along with them, for the right price. Von Gröning was clearly exploring alternative ways to get Chapman into Britain.

  Von Gröning and his protégé grew closer. Chapman’s own father had been distant, when he wasn’t absent entirely, and he had not seen him now for a decade. Von Gröning, avuncular and apparently kindly, stepped into the role. The affection was not feigned on either part. In the evenings, while von Gröning soaked up the brandy, Chapman would listen rapt as the older man talked of art, music, and literature. They discovered a shared pleasure in the novels of H. G. Wells and the poetry of Tennyson. Very occasionally, von Gröning would stray into politics or military matters. He remained convinced that Germany would win the war, and that any attempt by the Allies to invade France would result in “a tremendous bloodbath.”5 But his was the assessment of an experienced soldier, not a statement of ideology. To Chapman’s surprise, he praised the tactical skill of the Allied invasion of North Africa, and described the British raid on nearby Saint-Nazaire as “very cleverly planned6 and excellently carried out.” In August, the Allies launched the disastrous Dieppe raid on France’s northern coast, with the loss of four thousand men killed, wounded, or captured. The German victory was celebrated with a party at La Bretonnière, but von Gröning also raised a toast to the “courage and daring”7 of the Allied commandos.

  If von Gröning’s view of the war was nuanced and balanced, then that of his deputy was precisely the opposite. Praetorius and
von Gröning had never warmed to each other. Praetorius regarded his boss as the snobbish remnant of an old world, while the younger man was altogether too enthralled by Hitler for von Gröning’s liberal tastes. The young Nazi insisted the scale of Russian losses meant victory on the eastern front was imminent. Stalingrad would fall in 1943, to be followed by a “full-scale attack8 on Britain with all main forces from Europe and the Russian Front.” Rommel would conquer all, he insisted, while the prospect of a “terrific Blitz”9 on Britain, the land he so admired, sent Praetorius into spasms of delight: “You can imagine10 what it would be like with all of our Stukas and all of the men who have been trained and hardened and toughened,” Praetorius exclaimed. “What could the Americans do?” Chapman was beginning to find him extremely irritating.

  One morning in midsummer, von Gröning instructed Chapman to pack his bags: He was going to Berlin with “Thomas” for the next phase of his training. In the early hours of a foggy morning, the train from Paris pulled up in a small railway station on the outskirts of the German capital. A car was waiting for them. Chapman asked where they were heading. Praetorius seemed tense and embarrassed. “It is rather awkward11 at the present moment because if anyone realises you are British we should both be shot without any questions being asked.” He then added politely: “Would you mind not asking any more questions?” They seemed to be passing through densely wooded suburbs, but it was still dark outside and the driver had deliberately dimmed his headlights, so that Chapman could see almost nothing. From the faint shimmer of dawn on the horizon, he judged they were heading north.