Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  Praetorius ushered Chapman to one side. He seemed uncomfortable, fidgeting and twitching even more than usual, and whispered: “I have rather19 an embarrassing thing to do, but for every agent we do it, but it is only matter of form and I hope you won’t be insulted.”

  “What is it?”

  Praetorius explained that before heading to Britain, Chapman must be thoroughly searched, for any labels, receipts, tickets, or other items from France or Germany that might indicate he was a spy from occupied territory. Chapman could not be allowed to leave with “anything which could20 possibly be recognised as coming from us.”

  “You don’t mind21?” Praetorius asked.

  “Of course not.”

  Far from objecting, Chapman was grateful for the inadvertent warning from “Thomas.” When everyone else had staggered drunkenly to bed, Chapman took all the notes he had made—the radio frequencies, formulas, codes, and names—and burned every scrap.

  In the morning, a doctor arrived to give Chapman a full medical examination, and then, with Praetorius and von Gröning standing over him, he packed his British canvas rucksack with everything that a German spy might possibly need in enemy territory, and much that he might not:

  1 entrenching tool

  1 wireless

  1 Colt revolver, loaded, with spare cylinder

  2 handkerchiefs

  12 detonators, carefully packed in sawdust in case he hit the ground hard

  chocolate

  grape jelly

  1 hat

  1 razor

  1 compass

  1 matchbox, with “matches” for secret writing

  1 pair spectacles (clear glass)

  2 clean shirts

  1 British army map

  1 ID card in the name of George Clarke of Hammersmith

  1 ID card in the name of Morgan O’Bryan of Dublin, electrical engineer

  Every item was either of British manufacture or made to appear so. Even his wallet was filled with everyday items, taken from the dead at Dieppe: two deck-chair tickets, one Torquay golf-club ticket, one YMCA hostel receipt, and family photographs, all of people Chapman had never met. Here, too, was Betty’s love note on Royal Yacht Hotel letterhead paper, now badly creased and frayed—the only authentic item among the substitutes.

  With a peculiar expression, von Gröning now handed Chapman a single brown pill, wrapped in a tiny cellophane package, explaining that Chapman could swallow it “if there was any trouble.”22 The word “trouble” did not need defining. Both men knew what happened to captured German spies; what might be done to a spy who was also British did not require elaboration.

  Chapman bade farewell to the men of the unit, to Bobby the Pig, and to La Bretonnière, the only “home,”23 as he put it, he had known in ten years. He had found “genuine comradeship”24 here, albeit with some remarkably nasty people. Before leaving, he handed Praetorius 500 francs, and told him to buy a drink for the boys.

  That night Chapman, von Gröning, and Praetorius stayed at the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs in Paris. In the morning, Prateorius searched him as promised, and then handed over a canvas bag sealed with oilskin containing £990 in used notes of varying denominations. Had Chapman looked inside the money bag, he might have spotted that the wads of money were held together by bands stamped “Reichsbank, Berlin,”25 with “England” written on them in pencil. In an unbelievable act of thoughtlessness, the Abwehr had given Chapman a cash package that immediately identified him as a German spy. Having checked every inch of his clothing for clues, Praetorius had handed Chapman a death sentence in used notes.

  Waiting at Le Bourget airfield was a Luftwaffe colonel whom Chapman recognized from his parachute practice. The colonel seemed to know all about Chapman’s mission, for he discussed with him the merits of the Mosquito bomber, and the importance of halting its production. “You have beautiful planes,”26 he added.

  The colonel introduced a pilot, a tall, blond young man wearing an Iron Cross, who then led Chapman across the tarmac toward a sleek black plane, twenty-five feet long with twin engines and machine guns mounted on each side. This, the pilot explained with pride, was a Focke-Wulf of the latest design, adapted for parachuting. A square section had been cut from the floor of the fuselage and replaced by a wooden panel, wedged tight with packing material. Pulling a release handle caused the trapdoor to drop away. Chapman would be taken across the Channel by a three-man crew: the young pilot, Leutnant Fritz Schlichting; Uberleutnant Karl Ischinger, the navigator and commander; and an Unteroffizier as wireless operator and gunner. They would be communicating by a tubular intercom “of the larynx type.”27 Chapman noticed that the pilot appeared to be deliberately standing in front of the control panel, as if to prevent his passenger from inspecting it.

  At the hut, Chapman slipped his flying overalls on top of his civilian clothes, the old suit that he taken to Jersey all those years ago. As he buttoned up the flying suit, strapped on his kneepads, and laced up his landing boots, Chapman noticed that his hands were shaking.

  There was a delay as they waited for a weather report from Britain. Chapman smoked cigarette after cigarette. To make conversation, Chapman asked what the chances were of being shot down by flak or night fighters. The young pilot laughed, and said they could “evade attack”28 using a device to deflect sound: From the ground, the plane would appear to be at least one kilometer behind its actual position. Chapman realized that none of the crew was wearing a parachute, and he felt a tiny surge of reassurance.

  Shortly after 11:00 p.m., the pilot beckoned Chapman toward the plane. Von Gröning and the Luftwaffe colonel walked alongside as he clomped over the tarmac. It was slow going, encumbered by the kneepads and landing boots, the parachute and bulky kit bag strapped to his back. Chapman shook hands with the friend whose real name he did not know, who declared that the moment he received the first message from Fritz he would break out the champagne at La Bretonnière. “We shall be waiting,29 the Colonel and I,” said von Gröning. “We shall definitely be waiting.”

  Chapman squeezed through the cockpit hatch, and the pilot instructed him to kneel over the floor hole, facing the rear of the plane. The gunner was already seated at the rear. The navigator scrambled in behind.

  At 11:25 p.m., the Focke-Wulf took off from Le Bourget into the darkness. The sole illumination inside the cockpit was a tiny flashlight held by the wireless operator. As the plane banked, Chapman caught glimpses of many small lights in the distance. They climbed higher. He thought he could smell sea air. Suddenly, the cockpit was freezing, despite the meager warmth from a heater. The wireless man indicated that Chapman should strap on his oxygen mask. From time to time, the navigator would write something on a small piece of paper and hand it over his head to the pilot. If Chapman lay facedown, the pack squeezed the breath out of him. On his knees, he was unable to straighten his back or turn around. Chapman felt cramp creeping up his body. Something warm and tickling ran over his chin. He had failed to strap the mask tightly enough; blood was seeping from his nose. As they crossed over the English coast north of Skegness, he saw searchlights slicing the sky. The plane seemed to spiral down, the engines in a fighting scream, and then rose again. Passing over the Cambridgeshire fens, the Focke-Wulf performed a strange figure-of-eight dance in the sky. Chapman fastened his helmet, and tied his parachute cord to a bolt overhead. The crew seemed unperturbed: “Far from being nervous30 or apprehensive, they laughed and joked,” as if on a joyride.

  Chapman felt the pilot tap him on the back. He tore off the oxygen mask, got to his knees, and yanked the release handle. The trapdoor vanished beneath him, and he jolted downward, but instead of falling through air, he was suspended, head down, on the underside of the plane, the air rushing past him, tearing his breath away. His outsized pack had caught on the sides of the hatch. He dangled, helpless, for what seemed like an age, but was in truth no more than ten seconds. Then he felt a blow in the small of his back—the boot of the wireless operator—and he was somersa
ulting down. A loud crack, a jolt, and the parachute obediently fluttered open above him. Suddenly, it was utterly quiet. The blood dripped off his chin. In the far distance, he saw searchlights jousting in the dark. Below he heard the wail of a siren, signaling the all clear. For a strange moment, he wondered if that might be France down there, and not England. Could this be another of von Gröning’s tests? For twelve minutes, he drifted down through the still, windless night, toward a spot in the darkness below. He was at least twenty miles from where he was supposed to be.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Martha’s Exciting Night

  AT 1:48 P.M. on the morning of December 16, Sergeant Joseph Vail of the Littleport police heard what he thought must be two separate planes, or one with two very powerful engines, over the west side of the town. An alert was immediately relayed to every police station in the area: “Keep a close watch1 in area Wisbech–Downham Market–Ely as a plane has been spotted circling in the neighborhood having come south from the Lincolnshire coast. Suggest it might be Nightcap, although not in expected area.” Another telephone call was made to a number in Whitehall, then another to the home of Colonel Tar Robertson, who got up and put on his tartan trousers. At this point, Eddie Chapman’s feet had not yet touched the ground.

  Operation Nightcap was the code name for MI5’s “Fritz-trap.” As early as October, a message had been intercepted revealing that Fritz would “very soon be going2 on his holiday,” and a warning had been sent to security service liaison officers in three different areas of the country to expect the arrival of an enemy agent:

  Agent X is probably3 under 30 and about six feet tall. He may use the name Chapman. He speaks English, French and German. He is a trained wireless operator. It is possible that Agent X may be supplied with means of committing suicide e.g. poison tablets. On arrest he should therefore be immediately searched, detained pending inquiries and sent up to London under escort.

  For months, British radio interceptors had monitored every dot and dash of the Fritz traffic, until they imagined they knew the man intimately. From the Most Secret Sources, the counterespionage team had obtained a broad idea of Fritz’s mission, although not of the plan to target the De Havilland Mosquito factory. The traffic suggested that there were three possible drop zones: Mundford, North Norfolk, and the Cambrian Mountains, with the last named regarded as the most probable. Robertson had even discovered Fritz’s real surname, although this initially proved more of a red herring since MI5 had spent several fruitless days investigating the entirely innocent Robert William Chapman, a soldier who had been reported missing in the Western Desert of Egypt and who might, it was surmised, have been recruited by the Abwehr while a prisoner of war.

  The spy catchers of B1A knew the details of Fritz’s dentistry, the names on his fake ID cards, and even the approximate length of his hair after the Most Secret Sources reported: “It may be of intelligence4 interest that Fritzchen said in clear at 1300 GMT today that he ‘could not keep his schedule this morning as he was having a hair cut.’ ” They knew that his password was “Joli Albert,” the color of his boots, and the poisonous contents of the turnups in his trousers.

  But MI5 also knew that the chance of catching Fritz, even with the information from the Most Secret Sources, was slim.

  There had been much debate within B Division, the counter-espionage branch of MI5, about the best way to ensnare him. A full police dragnet, with roadblocks and house-to-house searches, was rejected on the grounds that it offered “too many possibilities5 of leakage and subsequent press notices.” If an enemy agent was alerted to the hunt, the Germans might realize that their messages were being read, and the Most Secret Sources must be protected at all costs. Another option was to prepare a “flying column”6 of Field Security Police—or FSP—the military police attached to the security service, which could be mobilized to the drop zone at short notice. This, too, was rejected, since it might “cause problems with local police and offer only a small chance of success.”

  Finally, it was decided to set up a combination of traps and hope that at least one was sprung. As soon as the Most Secret Sources received an indication that Fritz was on his way, Operation Nightcap would be mobilized, Dick White would be called at his private telephone number in London, and regional liaison officers and Fighter Command would be placed on alert. An intelligence officer stationed at Fighter Command would track incoming planes, and if an enemy aircraft was spotted that seemed to be heading for one of the three target areas, he would alert the night-duty officer at MI5, who would then contact the chief constable in the area with instructions to scour the countryside, but discreetly. If the plane was shot down, the parachutist would bail out and could then be picked up. If, however, the spy managed to land undetected, the police should “comb out” boardinghouses and hotels. Participants in Nightcap were told sternly: “Whatever you do you should emphasise to all your collaborators the vital necessity of keeping the search as quiet as possible…the public must not be told that a parachute agent is being looked for.” If the police were asked why they were whacking every bush and looking up every tree, they should “pretend to be looking for a deserter.”

  Despite the elaborate preparations, MI5 was well aware that its net was full of holes. This was clearly a well-trained agent, a “fully fledged saboteur7…capable of operating his W/T set perfectly.” Being English, Fritz was equipped with the finest camouflage a spy could have, and he was about to be dropped in any one of three remote, sparsely populated areas, each up to twelve miles in diameter. He had money, a gun, and, to judge from the Most Secret Sources, plenty of gumption. MI5 was realistic: “We quite realise8 that our plans do not offer more than a 40% chance of finding our man if he keeps his head and plays his part well.”

  Fighter Command did pick up the Focke-Wulf, and six fighters from Number 12 Fighter Group were sent in pursuit. One of these got within range, but then “the instruments of the plane packed up for no understandable reason.” The German plane got away, and only Sergeant Vail’s vigilance ensured that Operation Nightcap happened at all. Because Chapman had struggled for vital moments to extricate himself from a plane flying at 350 miles per hour, he had landed well outside the expected drop zone. In the end, the person who ensured the capture of Agent X was Eddie Chapman.

  Martha Convine could not sleep. She had been woken by a plane, droning loudly overhead, and lay wondering whether it was German. She was getting drowsy, when the all-clear siren had woken her up again. Her husband, George, foreman of Apes Hall Farm, Ely, was snoring steadily, of course, because George could sleep through the Battle of Britain, and recently had. Martha was finally dropping off when she heard a loud banging on the door.

  Martha shook George awake, put on her dressing gown, and peered out of the window into the darkness. “Who is it?”9

  A man’s voice replied: “A British airman, had an accident.”

  It was 3:30 in the morning. For the last hour, Chapman had been stumbling around the wet celery fields in the darkness, dazed and still traumatized from being dangled out of an aircraft at terrifying speed. He had almost hit an empty barn on the way down, and he seemed to have lost his map. Finally, he had found the eighteenth-century stone farmhouse and shone his flashlight through the window in the door. On the hall table lay an English telephone book—a relief since it meant, of course, that the glutinous mud that had been steadily caking his boots for the last hour was British, and not French.

  While George sleepily lit the lamp, Mrs. Convine went downstairs and opened the door. The figure on the doorstep might have emerged from a swamp. Martha “noticed he had blood on his face.” He was also wearing a lounge suit. You can’t be too careful in wartime, so Martha asked him where his plane was. He gestured vaguely at the surrounding countryside: “Across the fields,” he said, mumbling that he had come down by parachute.

  “I thought I heard a ‘Jerry,’ ” said Martha.

  “Yes,”10 the man said, nonsensically. “That would be a cover p
lane for ours.”

  Indeed, he really did not start making sense until he was sitting by the range in the kitchen with a cup of tea in his hand. He had asked to use the telephone, and George, who was a special constable and knew the number by heart, dialed the police station at Ely for him. The man spoke very quietly into the mouthpiece, but Martha distinctly heard him say that he had “just arrived from France,”11 which was thrilling.

  By the time Sergeants Vail and Hutchings arrived in the police car with two constables, it was 4:30, and the parachutist had drunk three cups of tea, and eaten four slices of toast, and was evidently feeling much better, even cheery.

  Convine led the policemen to the living room, where the man was chatting with Martha. Vail reported that “he shook hands with us and appeared agitated, but pleased to see us.” He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a pistol, saying: “I expect the first thing you want is this.” He unloaded the gun and handed it to Vail, along with another loaded magazine.

  When Vail asked where he had arrived from, the man replied: “France. I want to get in touch with the British Intelligence Service. It is a case for them. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much.”

  An oblong parcel, sewn in sacking, lay on one of the living-room chairs. The man explained that it contained his “radio transmitter, chocolate and shirts.” When Vail asked if he had any money, he stripped off his shirt to reveal “a small package strapped to his back between his shoulder blades,” which he removed and handed over. Inside, the astonished officer glimpsed wads of banknotes. He also produced his wallet, with an identity card for “George Clarke.”