Agent Zigzag
Page 13
Establishing a complete picture of Chapman’s life in France would take time, but time was already running out. The day after his arrival at Camp 020, Chapman scribbled a message for Colonel Stephens, pointing out that “today was the supposed start25 of my transmission” and recalling von Gröning’s observation about British red tape.
“It is important26 that we have a connection with the ‘Boche’ at earliest possible moment,” he wrote, perhaps deliberately deploying the sort of language favored by Stephens. “Dr. Graumann especially27 stressed the point. He may suspect we may be arranging something. He probably thinks it would take much longer for me to commence, if I was arranging anything with yourselves.”
The same day, the Radio Security Service began to pick up the German reply station in Paris. Every three minutes, starting at 9:45 a.m., Maurice sent out a message, calling for Fritz to respond. MI5 now faced a quandary. If contact was delayed, von Gröning would suspect something had gone wrong; but if they responded without being absolutely certain that Chapman was playing straight, then the results could be catastrophic. It was decided to wait a day or two, in order to get Chapman, and his motives, “in sharper focus.”28
By evening, Chapman had still received no response from Stephens. He had been interrogated now for forty-eight hours with only brief intermissions; he was tired and anxious. Unless contact was made soon, the consequences could be dire. He was also torn: between the affection he still felt for von Gröning and the urgent need to betray him; by the desire to save his own skin and that of Tony Faramus; between self-interest and some greater good, as yet undefined; between loyalty to his friends and duty to his country. He wrote another, much longer letter to Stephens. It is an extraordinary document, a combination of self-pity, self-examination, and self-assertion, reflecting the internal agony of the spy. It is the statement of a man groping his way through moral darkness toward the light.
Mon Commandant,29
One does not expect gratitude from one’s own country—but allow me to draw your attention to a few facts. For thirteen months now I have been under German rule. During this time even when undergoing detention I was treated with strict fairness and friendliness. I made many friends—people who I respect and who I think came to like me—unfortunately for them and for me.
I set out from the first day to try to mass together a series of facts, places, dates etc. concerning the German organization, which I think would be a task fairly formidable even for one of your trained experts. From the start I was very much handicapped, my knowledge of German was slight, my French even less—two languages most essential for this work. I studied French until I mastered it, even learning the slang. I read it now as fluently as English. Then, sir, for nine months I listened to every conversation I could hear. I opened many drawers containing documents “geheim” [secret] written on all of them. I bored very small holes from the bathroom to the room of Dr. Graumann, a man very much my friend.
Don’t think I’m asking for any friendship now, it’s a little late—on the other hand this strange thing patriotism. I laugh a little cynically when I think of it sometimes. I have fought the fight and my country won (why I can’t explain). I wish like hell there had been no war—I begin to wish I had never started this affair. To spy and cheat on one’s friends it’s not nice it’s dirty. However, I started this affair and I will finish it. Don’t think I ask anything for this, I don’t. It seems very strange to be working for two different governments—one offers me the chance of money, success and a career. The other offers me a prison cell. There is not a great deal of time left to arrange things.
Yours sincerely,
Eddie
While Chapman was penning this heartfelt note, Stephens was gathering together his four interrogators for a conference on what to do with this remarkable and potentially very valuable crook. As Stephens pointed out, Chapman had accepted that he was in a strange position, wanted by the British police but offering—pleading—to work for British intelligence. “If Chapman is to be believed,30 he offered to work for the Germans as a means of escape [and] on landing he immediately put himself at the disposal of the British authorities to work against the Germans.” The preliminary psychological profile indicated that Chapman’s motives, despite his personal affection for Graumann, were “hatred for the Hun31 coupled with a sense of adventure. There is no woman in the case and no bargain for rehabilitation. He is possessed of courage and nerve.”
But there was plainly a problem. If Chapman was allowed his liberty, he would surely be picked up by the police. He had even remarked on it to Stephens: “As I figure it out,32 with my brilliant past, I am due for a stretch of something like fourteen years.” Worse, he might link up with his criminal gang again. But if he was kept under guard in Camp 020, Stephens predicted, “he will go sour33 and might attempt a break.” The only way to operate him safely would be to place him at half liberty, under surveillance but not in prison, “under control in a quiet, country place.”
“My opinion,” Stephens declared, “is that Chapman should be used for XX [Double Cross] purposes…and then sent back to France to join a party of saboteurs already in training to be sent to America for a really big job.”
The interrogation team unanimously agreed. There was a risk in sending Chapman back into France. He might be exposed by the Germans, or he might confess all to them; he might even change sides again. But the potential benefits of having a spy at the heart of the German secret service outweighed the dangers. That evening, Camp 020 sent a message to the Double Cross team in St. James’s Street: “In our opinion,34 Chapman should be used to the fullest extent…he genuinely means to work for the British against the Germans. By his courage and resourcefulness he is ideally fitted to be an agent.”
Tar Robertson had been following every twist of the developing case and agreed to send one of his case officers to take a look at Chapman the next day. Before Chapman could be inducted into the XX fold, he would need a code name. By convention, the names of agents should be plucked from thin air, mere handles that did not connect in any way with their real identities. But the convention was constantly flouted. “Snow,” of course, was a partial anagram of Owens; another double agent was called “Tate” because Robertson thought he looked like the comedian Harry Tate; it was said that Dusko Popov, a rather louche Yugoslavian agent, had been named “Tricycle” because of his taste for three-in-a-bed sex. The name selected for Edward Chapman could not have been more apt.
On the evening of December 18, Tar sent a message to all B1A personnel: “We have chosen35 the name of Zigzag for Fritzchen.”
Eddie Chapman, December 16, 1942.
Photographed at Camp 020, MI5’s secret wartime interrogation center, in the hours following his landing by parachute in Cambridgeshire.
KV2 462 © National Archives
Chapman at Camp 020, muddy-faced after landing in a damp celery field.
KV2 462 © National Archives
Chapman eating Christmas dinner, 1942, at the MI5 safe house, 35 Crespigny Road. The photograph was taken by Allan Tooth, his police minder.
KV2 462 © National Archives
While the previous photograph shows Chapman grinning merrily, another reveals the spy looking more morose—a reflection, perhaps, of his violent mood swings. KV2 462 © National Archives
An Irish identity pass for Chapman created by Nazi forgers, one of two fake ID cards he carried with him in 1942. The photograph, taken in a studio in Nantes, shows Chapman in typical matinee-idol pose.
KV2 462 © National Archives
The merchant seaman’s pass forged for Chapman by MI5 in the name of Hugh Anson, a former member of his criminal gang.
KV2 462 © National Archives
Jersey under Occupation: A British police sergeant takes orders from a Nazi officer. © Popperfoto
Norway under Occupation: Vidkun Quisling, collaborator in chief and Nazi puppet, inspects the “Viking Regiment,” composed of Norwegian Nazi volunteers.
The entrance to Fort de Romainville, the nineteenth-century Paris fortress that was transformed into a Nazi concentration camp. From the collection of Anthony Faramus, in Journey into Darkness, Grafton Books, 1990
Faramus (right), age twenty-three, approximately, in the Mauthausen-Gusen death camp. From the collection of Anthony Faramus, in Journey into Darkness,
Grafton Books, 1990
Anthony Charles Faramus playing a POW in the 1957 film The Colditz Story. From the collection of Anthony Faramus, in Journey into Darkness, Grafton Books, 1990
The Mosquito bomber under construction at the De Havilland aircraft factory in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. © Times (London)
A Mosquito—the “Wooden Wonder”—being prepared for a bombing run over Germany. © Times (London)
The De Havilland aircraft factory, with Mosquitoes on the airfield behind. The two men leaning against the wall may be Allan Tooth and Paul Backwell, Chapman’s MI5 minders. KV2 457 © National Archives
The faked sabotage of De Havilland’s: Tarpaulins have been draped over the buildings, painted to simulate the damage from an explosion, while debris has been spread around the area. KV2 458 © National Archives
The City of Lancaster, the three-thousand-ton merchant vessel commanded by Captain Reginald Kearon that carried Chapman to Lisbon.
© National Maritime Museum
The coal bomb constructed by Nazi engineers in Lisbon that Chapman agreed to take on board the City of Lancaster. KV461
© National Archives
An X-ray of the coal bomb showing a block of explosive with cylindrical fuse that was encased in molded plastic and painted to resemble a lump of Welsh coal. KV2 461 © National Archives
The doctored photograph sent to Lisbon in 1944 for the Operation Squid deception. The ruler is eighteen inches long but appears to be only six inches, thus making the depth charge appear to be one-third of its real size. KV2 460
© National Archives
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
35 Crespigny Road
THE MAN DISPATCHED by Tar Robertson to handle Zigzag was Captain Ronnie Reed, a young, unobtrusive radio expert, and an inspired choice. A thin-faced man with a spindly mustache, spectacles, and a pipe, he looked like an archetypal middle-ranking army officer. Indeed, he looked so much like an archetypal middle-ranking army officer that when Tar Robertson needed a photograph to put on a fake identity card for Operation Mincemeat—in which a dead body, dressed in army uniform and carrying misleading information, was deliberately washed up on the coast of Spain—he chose a picture of Ronnie Reed. Reed looked just like everybody else, and nobody at all.
Reed’s father, a waiter at the Trocadero Restaurant, had died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and his mother brought him up in a tenement in King’s Cross. From the St. Pancras Church of England Primary School, he had won a scholarship to the Regent’s Park Polytechnic School, where he studied engineering and developed a passion for radios. He could build a wireless from scratch, and with his school friend Charlie Chilton (who went on to become a celebrated radio presenter and producer) he would broadcast to the world from his bedroom with a homemade transmitter: Ronnie would sing a warbling rendition of Bing Crosby’s “Dancing in the Dark” while Charlie strummed the guitar.
The outbreak of war found Reed working as a BBC radio engineer by day and flying through the ether by night with the call sign G2RX. One night, Reed and his mother had taken cover during an air raid when a police car drew up. Reed was summoned from the shelter and driven, through the falling bombs, to Wormwood Scrubs. A man was standing at the prison gate. “Ah, Mr. Reed,1 we’ve been waiting for you. Come in.” He was led through dimly lit corridors to a cell on the first floor.
“In there,” said the man.
“W…What? Me?” asked Reed, trying to imagine why he was being imprisoned.
“Yes, please.”
Inside the cell, flanked by two guards, was a man in flying uniform, his face covered in blood.
“This man is a parachutist,” said an officer with red tabs on his uniform, who had entered the cell behind Reed. “He’s supposed to transmit tonight back to Germany. We want you to go out into a field in Cambridge, and transmit, and make sure he sends the message we have prepared.”
That night, Reed and the parachutist, Gösta Caroli, who was soon to become the double agent “Summer,” sat in a pigsty in a Cambridgeshire field and sent a Morse code message to Hamburg: “I’m going underground for a few days, while I sort out some accommodation, and I’ve arrived safely.” So began Reed’s career in the secret service.
Shy, gentle, and reserved, Reed was easy to overlook, but he was the “humble genius”2 of wartime wireless work, perfectly tuned to the arcane mysteries of the radio. He also had the knack of identifying the “fist” of another operator, and then of being able to imitate it precisely—he was probably the best Morse-code mimic in Britain. Reed’s skills made him indispensable to Robertson’s team, and soon he was monitoring all double-agent radio traffic. One of his tasks was to stand over agents as they transmitted back to the Abwehr, to ensure they were not inserting coded messages. If an agent was unwilling or unable to transmit, then Reed would send the message himself, complete with the agent’s telltale “fingerprint.” But Ronnie Reed was more than just an accomplished radio ham; under Robertson’s guidance, he was developing into a first-rate intelligence officer. He was incisive, sympathetic, and virtually invisible.
Reed shook hands with his new charge for the first time in Chapman’s cell. The young officer had planned to take an instant dislike to this unrepentant criminal with the “lurid past.”3 But like most people, and against his will, he found himself charmed.
Reed frankly explained that if Chapman was to work for MI5, he would need to live a hermitlike existence. Any contact with the police, the Bohemians of Soho, or the criminal fraternity would be forbidden. Instead, Reed explained, he “would have to work4 for us under strict supervision in almost complete isolation from other members of the community.” Chapman laughed and said that after all the recent excitement, a quiet life would be most welcome. Reed said he would return the following day to make the first transmission to Germany, and left Chapman to draft a message, using the Constantinople code and the FFFFF control sign. Reed would then check it, and sit beside him as he transmitted it.
As changeable as ever, Chapman seems to have been buoyed by his conversation with Reed, for he now sent another letter to Stephens. Gone was the peevish, introverted tone. Now he was positively chatty.
Mon Commandant,5
Merci pour votre bonté. As we have little time to get to know each other—let me start and give you a little explanation. At the present moment my story is very difficult to tell. My mind is such a frenzied mass of names, formulas, descriptions, places, times, explosions, radio telegraphy and parachute jumping, small but important conversations, intrigue playing against intrigue. On top of this you must try and imagine a brain—weakened by three years of imprisonment and many months in the punishment cell…sometimes in trying to put facts together I really thought I was going mad…these things are not untrue, they have all passed—but dates, names, times, are all jumbled in my head higgledy-piggledy, like some giant jigsaw puzzle…To conclude Mon Commandant. Be a little patient with me if my places and dates and times don’t coincide…I’m afraid that whole thing has rather passed like a dream: it’s for you to try and make it a realisation.
Eddie
Tin Eye Stephens was accustomed to intimidating new arrivals at Camp 020. He was not used to being addressed in this facetious tone or told what to do, let alone by a loutish young burglar in prison garb. But instead of exploding, as he might have done, Stephens just chuckled and tucked the note in the Zigzag file.
The next morning, Chapman was picked up by Reed and two burly Field Security policemen in a Blue Maria and driven 150 yards from the front gate of Latchmere House to the Equestrian Club, a small con
cert hall within the grounds used as a clubhouse, with a twenty-five-foot flagpole that Reed thought would serve as an aerial. The place was deserted. While the FSPs stood guard, Reed set up Chapman’s wireless.
At 10:02 a.m., under Reed’s vigilant gaze, Chapman tried to contact his Abwehr controllers. At 10:06 a.m., the reply station responded that it was receiving him “rather weakly”6 and with interference, but gave the go-ahead. Agent Zigzag then tapped out his first message as a double agent: FFFFF HAVE ARRIVED.7 AM WELL WITH FRIENDS. O.K. He added his usual laughing coda: HI HU HA.
In the afternoon, the Most Secret Sources reported that the Abwehr stations in France had confirmed that this message was “definitely Fritz”8 because they “recognised his style9 of sending and especially the method he adopts for signing off his messages.” The deception was up and running.
The following morning, Reed and Chapman found it impossible to renew the contact with Paris. It appeared that the transmissions were being picked up in Nantes, but not at the main receiving station in the capital. A second message was sent “blind”: FFFFF GET MORRIS10 [SIC] BRING YOUR SET NEARER COAST. MUST HAVE BETTER RECEPTION. F. OK.
By late December they received the first direct message from von Gröning: THANKS FOR MESSAGE.11 WISH GOOD RESULTS. OK.
So far, the double cross seemed to be working, although it would be two weeks before the problems of reception and transmission could be ironed out. The radio traffic was code-named ZINC, and filed alphabetically alongside Zigzag.
Chapman seemed more than cooperative, Reed reported, and was still producing a steady stream of valuable intelligence: “Zigzag’s powers of observation12 are extremely good and he is being quite truthful in whatever he tells us.” (Reading that assessment, John Masterman noted that he was skeptical that such a man even understood the concept of complete honesty.)