Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  After a drive of twenty-five minutes, they passed through a pair of iron gates guarded by three sentries in military uniform, down a long drive lined with flower beds, and through a high stone arch, before pulling up in front of a small Schloss with a tower, surrounded by trees, a high stone wall, and barbed-wire fences. At the door stood a man in early middle age, short but athletically built, with a dignified air. His wife, rather taller, hovered anxiously in the background; pictures of their children were arranged in the hall. The little man introduced himself as “Herr Doktor.” He explained that Chapman was free to wander the castle grounds between lessons, but should on no account try to leave the estate.

  Wojch had been a skilled teacher of practical sabotage, but Chapman’s new tutor was in a different league. Over the next week, Chapman would be given an intensive course in the very latest explosive technology, by a master of the subject. MI5 later identified him as one Dr. Ackerman, a professional chemist, and one of the most knowledgeable explosives experts in Germany. Chapman was shown into a laboratory, with rows of cork-stopped glass bottles, test tubes, thermos flasks, measuring scales, pestles, and mortars. Patiently, painstakingly, the expert introduced Chapman to an unimagined universe of lethal science, the arcane secrets of explosives, burning mixtures, booby traps, and delayed sabotage.

  He taught Chapman how make a time fuse from a cheap wristwatch, by inserting a small screw with two nuts on it into the celluloid face and then attaching one end of electrical wire connected to a flashlight battery via the winding mechanism; when the small hand touched the screw, a charge would pass from the battery into a fuse and ignite the explosion. Next he took an alarm clock and demonstrated how to delay an explosion for up to fourteen hours, by linking the detonator to the winding spring. If no clock or watch was available, he could make a fuse by filling an ink bottle with sulfuric acid and placing a strip of cardboard between glass and lid; the acid would slowly eat away the cardboard, finally making contact with the fuse screwed into the lid, where the heat of the reaction would detonate the explosive charge.

  Next, he took a large lump of coal from the scuttle and showed Chapman how to drill a hole in it six inches deep and pack this with explosives and detonator, disguising the hole with plasticine, boot polish, and coal dust. Placed in the coal bunkers of a ship or train, the device would be invisible and inert, until shoveled into the furnace, where the heat would set it off.

  Chapman was taught how to dynamite munitions trains and petrol dumps, how to pack an attaché case with explosives and then place pajamas or a towel on top, to muffle the alarm-clock fuse inside. He learned how to construct a booby trap from a package that exploded when the string around a parcel was cut: inside the string were two strands of wire insulated from one another, so that when cut with scissors, an electric circuit was completed, setting off the explosion. Ackerman drew diagrams showing how to connect a series of linked explosives with dynamite wire and detonating fuse, and explained the formula for calculating how much high explosive would be needed to bring down a bridge (length × breadth × depth × 2 = ½ number of grams of explosive required). Some of Ackerman’s techniques were diabolically cunning: Placing a dead butterfly over the wire detonator attached to a railway line would ensure that the casual observer would never spot the device. When a train passed over it, the charge would explode, derailing the locomotive.

  The little explosives teacher neither smoked nor drank, and paused only for meals. Chapman decided he was a perfectionist: “He insisted on exact proportions,12 never hurrying, grinding everything very small and mixing it very carefully.” The ingredients needed to create a bomb could be bought over the counter at British hardware stores and pharmacies, Ackerman explained: potassium chlorate was a common slug killer, potassium nitrate, a fertilizer, potassium permanganate, a throat gargle; the British used ferric oxide as a floor stain, and ground aluminum as a silver paint powder. The lectures ran on late into the evening. After supper, Ackerman pulled up a chair beside the fire and continued his tutorials, sometimes calling on Praetorius to help translate technical terms.

  After five days, the doctor finally seemed satisfied, and Chapman was exhausted. He and Praetorius were picked up by the same driver in the middle of the night and driven back to the station in darkness.

  Back at La Bretonnière, Chapman was warmly greeted by von Gröning, who announced that he had devised a small test for him. A friend, one Major Meier, was responsible for security in the local factories, including the nearby Battignolles locomotive works. Von Gröning had boasted to Meier that he was training up a sabotage agent, a former burglar who could break into anything; he bet he could even place a dummy bomb in the locomotive factory. Major Meier had accepted the wager. A few nights later, Chapman and Leo hauled themselves over the barbed wire surrounding the factory, slipped passed the slumbering guard, and placed a package, addressed to Major Meier, alongside the main office. Von Gröning was delighted; with the money from the wager, he threw yet another party in honor of “Fritz.”

  Chapman went back to his mephitic potions in the gardener’s cottage. The successful raid on the locomotive works had been enjoyable, but after nearly five months in La Bretonnière, he was growing restless and frustrated by the enforced chastity. Leaving aside the whores of Nantes, he had barely seen a woman. The others laughed about the lack of female company, joking that they lived “like bloody monks.”13

  One evening, Chapman, Albert, and Wojch went out on a “spree” in Nantes, where they picked up some girls in one of the official cars. Unluckily, a Gestapo officer spotted the women climbing into their car and an official complaint was filed. When it reached von Gröning’s desk, he exploded. “There was a hell of a lot14 of trouble,” Chapman wrote. Wojch suffered the brunt of von Gröning’s fury: the rotund saboteur with the pearl tiepin was banished to a unit of the Wachkommando infantry based in distant Rocquencourt, near Paris. Chapman never saw him again. In a message to his bosses, von Gröning noted primly that Fritz, though ideal in every other respect, was apparently prone to what he called “undesirable emotional activity.”15

  As always, when bored and sexually stymied, Chapman lapsed into what he called his “nihilistic”16 frame of mind. His mood darkened still further when he raised a subject that had been troubling him ever since leaving Romainville. He asked for permission to write to Tony Faramus. Von Gröning refused, but said he would send the young man a food parcel. A little later, Chapman inquired once more: “Could something be done17 for him?” Von Gröning told him that this was “impossible”18 and changed the subject. Chapman now descended into a dark depression. He would lie on his bed for hours, smoking and staring at the ceiling. At one point, he even asked “if he could return19 to the camp at Romainville.” Von Gröning realized that unless he moved fast and put Chapman to work, he might lose this mercurial young spy prodigy altogether.

  On August 29, 1942, Chapman was summoned to von Gröning’s study and presented with a typed sheet of paper. He was told to read it and, if he agreed with the terms, to sign it. The document was a contract, a formally executed agreement to spy on his own country that is surely unique in the annals of legal history. The first section was a list of prohibitions: Chapman must never divulge to anyone the names of his German contacts in Jersey, France, or Germany, the places he had been, or the things he had learned. The penalty for violating any of these clauses would be death. Chapman would undertake to spy in the interests of the German High Command, and faithfully perform whatever mission he was set by the Abwehr. As compensation, he would be paid the following sums: while in France, he would receive 12,000 francs a month; from the date of his departure, he would be paid 300 reichsmarks a month, and payment would continue should he be captured. On his return, having completed his mission to the satisfaction of the Abwehr, he would receive the sum of 150,000 reichsmarks. Chapman estimated this was the equivalent of about £15,000—in fact, the value was nearer to £250, or around $15,000 at today’s prices. The contract was not
with the German government, but a personal legal agreement between Chapman and his spymaster: von Gröning had already signed it, in the name “S. Graumann (Doktor).”

  The final clause was a triumph of German bureaucratic thinking: Chapman would be legally obliged to pay all relevant taxes on these sums in France. The German secret service was about to send Chapman on a mission of treachery in which it was likely he would be killed or executed, and they were worrying about his tax return.

  As Chapman was digesting the terms of this extraordinary deal, the German spymaster asked him a question. If Scotland Yard caught him, approximately how many years could Chapman expect to spend in prison? Chapman had considered that question many times himself. He replied that he would probably receive a sentence of between fifteen and twenty years. The older man then turned to Praetorius and observed: “I don’t suppose20 there would be much danger of him surrendering to the police then.”

  Chapman signed the contract, but later found himself pondering that apparently offhand comment. Graumann, a man he had come to admire, had chosen him not because he was special, but because he was a criminal with a past so crooked he would never dare run to the authorities. Chapman had always known that was part of the German calculation, but the remark stung, and the sting remained.

  Filing away the signed contract, von Gröning began, for the first time, to outline Chapman’s mission: In a few weeks, he would be parachuted into Britain with a wireless and enough money to survive for a long period. He would then find a place to hide out and gather a quantity of explosives, with help from his criminal associates if needed. There were many important tasks Chapman could perform in Britain, but his primary target was to sabotage the aircraft factory manufacturing the Mosquito bomber in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

  The De Havilland Mosquito—or Anopheles de Havillandus, as military wags liked to call it—had proved a lethal nuisance to the Nazis ever since it went into production in 1940. Indeed, its effect on the German High Command was positively malarial. Designed and built at the De Havilland Aircraft Company factory outside London, it was a revolutionary military aircraft. Constructed almost entirely of wood, with a two-man crew and no defensive guns, the little plane could carry four thousand pounds of bombs to Berlin. With two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and a top speed of four hundred miles per hour, it could usually outrun enemy fighters. The Mosquito, nicknamed “the Wooden Wonder,” could be assembled, cheaply, by cabinetmakers and carpenters. It could be used for photoreconnaissance, night fighting, U-boat killing, minelaying, and transport, but its main task was target bombing, and being so light and accurate, it could destroy a single building with minimal harm to civilians. In the course of the war, Mosquitoes would pick off the Gestapo headquarters in Oslo, Shell House in Copenhagen, and the Amiens jail.

  Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, was particularly infuriated by the persistent little Mosquito; the mere mention of the plane could send him into a tailspin. “It makes me furious21 when I see the Mosquito,” he once ranted. “I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed that they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I’m going to buy a British radio set—then at least I’ll own something that has always worked.”

  For reasons therefore both military and political, the Abwehr had been devising a plan to combat the Mosquito for months. If the De Havilland production line could be stopped, by crippling the factory boilers and generator, this could tip the air war in Germany’s favor, demonstrate the worth of von Gröning’s new agent, and boost the Abwehr’s reputation. It might also mollify the irascible Reichsmarschall.

  That afternoon, von Gröning sent an exultant wireless message to Paris, reporting that he had conducted “preliminary detailed22 discussions” with Fritz, and persuaded him to sign a contract. The message was picked up in Britain, where the MI5 officer monitoring the Fritz traffic remarked ominously: “Things seem at last23 to be coming to a head.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Under Unseen Eyes

  THE CONTRACT IN Chapman’s hands may have been legally unenforceable, signed with a false name, and frankly absurd, but it had the desired psychological effect. The prospect of adventure sent Chapman’s spirits soaring once more. The drunken camaraderie of La Bretonnière was pleasant, to be sure, but at the back of his mind was Freda and the baby in England; also Betty; also Vera, his ex-wife; and, if none of the aforementioned worked out, then any number of Soho sirens.

  The days accumulated in a succession of tests, trials, details, and delays. The ugly spy catcher from Angers returned, in a “terrific Chrysler1 with a wireless,” to witness a demonstration of Chapman’s sabotage and shooting skills: He shot a line of wineglasses from fifteen paces, one after the other, and set off an acid fuse. The next performance was for a colonel from a Panzer division, who appeared in a Mercedes: Chapman blew up a tree stump in a timed explosion using batteries and a wristwatch. The same evening, von Gröning announced that he had tickets for the Folies Bergère, the music hall that was still playing to full houses in occupied Paris. Chapman was excited at the prospect of a night out in Paris, although his pleasure palled somewhat when he overheard von Gröning remark on the train that “the chief wanted2 to see him.” Chapman was not being taken to enjoy the spectacle; once again, he was the spectacle.

  That evening, as they entered the famous opera house in the Ninth Arrondissement, Chapman heard his spymaster whisper to Thomas: “Let Fritz go first,3 and he will just sit behind.” The show was already under way in a froth of petticoated dancers doing the cancan when two men in civilian clothes quietly entered and sat directly behind them. One had a mustache and a pronounced limp: “He kept looking at me the whole time, sort of behind his programme,” Chapman recalled. This individual was most probably Rudolf Bamler, head of Abwehr counterintelligence and one of the few die-hard Nazis in the organization. After the show, von Gröning left by taxi, while Praetorius and Chapman walked back to the hotel, pausing to look in the shop windows: “Each time I looked,” wrote Chapman. “I saw these two men very carefully studying me.”

  Chapman was relieved to get back to the Grand Hotel. As he and Praetorius walked to their rooms, he heard American voices coming from von Gröning’s suite. He turned to his minder: “Americans?”4

  “No, it’s just two5 of our fellows having a game,” said Praetorius, quickly. But that evening, by opening a cupboard door and pressing his ear to the folding partition that separated his room from that of von Gröning, he was sure that he could hear his chief talking to two Americans. One of them was saying: “Well, we would like6 to see the guy.” Chapman felt certain the “guy” was him; he recalled that Graumann had remarked that if the De Havilland sabotage was successful, he would be sent on “a big mission7 to America.”

  La Bretonnière had offered a brief feeling of freedom, but now he had the sensation of being watched and monitored as surely as if he had been back in prison with the warders spying through the slot in the iron door. Everyone, it seemed, was keeping an eye on Chapman: his comrades in Nantes, senior Nazi officials, American spies, and even, perhaps, his own countrymen.

  One night, in the Café de France in Nantes, Chapman caught sight of a young man regarding him intently from a corner table. Von Gröning had warned that he was “in all probability8 being watched by the British,” and had shown him some photographs of suspected agents, none of whom he recognized. Now he was convinced he was being tailed. The fellow was in his twenties, well built, with a side parting, a gray suit, and a “West End”9 look to him that seemed oddly familiar. Chapman looked away, disconcerted, and when he looked back a moment later, the man had vanished. Chapman did not mention the incident to von Gröning, but the urge to escape grew stronger: He must get to B
ritain, before the British got to him.

  In September, Chapman was escorted back to Ackerman’s Schloss in Berlin, arriving once more in the dead of night. “You have remembered10 everything,” the little German chemist declared, after he had thoroughly tested his pupil. “I am highly satisfied11 with you.” The scientist then launched into a detailed disquisition on exactly how to blow up the De Havilland plant. If the boilers were linked, he should explode the central one using fifteen kilograms of dynamite packed into an attaché case and a delay fuse of at least half an hour. The blast should wreck the other two, and three 80-ton boilers, the scientist explained, would mean 240 tons of matter “exploding in all directions,”12 which should destroy the generator at the same time.

  The chemist departed, to be replaced by an older man in civilian clothes, who announced, in English, that he had come to instruct Fritz in the use of “secret ink.” From a briefcase, he produced a sheet of white paper, and what appeared to be a matchstick with a white head. Chapman was instructed to place the writing paper on a newspaper, and then clean the paper on both sides for ten minutes using a wad of cotton wool wiped “in a rotary motion.”13 The paper was placed on a sheet of glass, and Chapman was shown how to sketch a message in block capitals using the matchstick, each word separated by dashes. The stick left no visible mark. Chapman was told he could now write in pencil on both sides of the paper, or in ink on the reverse side from the secret writing, as if it was an ordinary letter. The man then vanished, taking the scribbled sheets. When he returned a few hours later, the paper had been immersed in some sort of chemical solution and the secret message had emerged, “a faint greeny color,”14 behind the scrawled pencil. The Professor (as Chapman now christened him) handed over two more matchstick pens and told him to practice his secret writing twice a week. The letters would be forwarded to him, and he would assess their proficiency.