Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  Chapman’s reply was bleak: “My life is of little value and it would be better for me to die—not to throw my life away needlessly, but to do something by which I could make retribution [sic] for the wrongs I have committed.”

  Marshall shot back that this was “the coward’s way out. If you cause yourself to die now, that is an admission of defeat. You are now a thinking man. Man must progress, and you must play your part in making that progress possible. It is for you to decide whether a British victory would help mankind in his upwards progress, or whether it would be better if Nazi principles prevail.”

  Chapman replied that he had already made his mind up on that score: “England cannot be allowed to lose the war.”

  Marshall reflected that Chapman “has seen too much brutality and horror, the cowed French population [and] the brutality of the Gestapo,” to be able to stand aside. Marshall made his way home from Crespigny Road in the freezing London dawn, convinced that Chapman would now “play his part.”

  Reed was fascinated by Marshall’s report of his evening with Chapman, describing it as “a most valuable character study.”29 It revealed a man anxious to do his duty, but also determined to find some sort of resolution to his inner turmoil. Finding Chapman’s “higher destiny” in the war against Hitler would not be possible until he had made peace closer to home. It was time to unleash Operation Freda.

  On January 26, 1943, Freda and Diane were driven up to London and lodged at the Brent Bridge Hotel. The reunion took place that night. Backwell and Tooth, such gentle jailers, provided flowers, a bottle of champagne, and babysitting services. While Freda Stevenson and Eddie Chapman got reacquainted in an upstairs room, the policemen played with three-year-old Diane in the hotel lobby. Eddie had been coached to tell Freda that he had escaped from Jersey, and that in return the police had dropped all charges. “He would now join30 the army and be posted overseas.” She accepted the explanation without question. The following day, Freda and Diane moved into Crespigny Road, to become, in Backwell’s words, “part of the household,”31 which now was comprised of one crook and double agent, one dancer-turned-firewoman, one energetic toddler, and two long-suffering policemen.

  Freda had reentered Chapman’s life as abruptly and completely as he had left hers, almost four years earlier. In this bizarre parody of domesticity, Chapman no longer demanded trips to the West End or meetings with his former cronies, but seemed “quite content to limit32 himself to our own circle.” Of an evening, the young couple would walk, arm in arm, to the Hendon Way, while one policeman followed at a discreet distance, and the other looked after Diane and did the chores.

  Of course, the twin tasks of running an expanded household while operating an untested double agent did present logistical challenges. Freda had moved into Chapman’s bedroom. The challenge was, therefore, “to get Freda up, dressed and downstairs before 9:45 am, as the tapping of the key could be heard in the bathroom or on the stairs.” There was the additional difficulty that Mrs. West, the cleaner, came in during the mornings, but had to be prevented from operating her vacuum cleaner when Chapman was transmitting.

  One evening, at around seven, Chapman announced that he and Freda were retiring to bed. “Eddie, we’re on the air33 at 9 o’clock,” whispered Reed as the couple left. “Don’t forget.”

  At eight, Reed tiptoed up the stairs and knocked gently on the door. “You’ve got an hour, Eddie.” There was no reply.

  At 8:45, Reed banged on the door. “You’ve only got fifteen minutes, Eddie.”

  Chapman poked his head around the door. “Oh no, not just fifteen minutes,” he said, and vanished inside again.

  Reed was wondering whether he would have to go in and insist on coitus interruptus himself when, with minutes to spare, a tousled Freda finally emerged.

  Freda responded to the subterfuge with an impressive lack of curiosity. Her lover was seldom out of sight of one, and usually two, burly men who monitored his every move. More men, usually in civilian clothes but including one with striking tartan trousers, came and went at odd times of day, and Freda was often told to take a long walk with the toddler. Sometimes Eddie could be heard practicing German nouns. There were some very odd-looking chemicals in the kitchen cupboard. “Freda must have got very used34 to the strange happenings,” Backwell reflected. “But she never asked any questions.” When she and Chapman had lived together in Shepherd’s Bush, there had been unexplained comings and goings and peculiar men whose presence and business was never explained, so it may have seemed just like old times. “Although she knew35 very little of what was going on, she accepted things without question and became quite accustomed to the three of us always being together,” wrote Tooth.

  The transformation in Chapman’s mood was immediate. “Since he has seen Freda36 and the child, E has been in very good spirits and says that his whole outlook toward the future has changed. He now has a ‘raison d’être.’ He has lost interest in other women and in going to the West End, and says he is quite prepared to remain in this neighborhood, working on his cover story and preparations for his return to France.” In place of the gloomy grouch of before, the new Chapman seemed positively ebullient. He doted on his daughter, a bubbly child whose vitality and noise filled the house. Chapman’s black nihilism gave way to an equally extreme optimism and an exaggerated self-confidence. He even began to discuss what he might do when the war ended, something he had never done before. He talked of moving to Poland with Freda, and setting up a cabaret, or simply returning to crime, since he doubted “his capacity to live37 a law-abiding life.” But he also wondered whether there might be a place for him in the secret services, as this “would fulfill his need38 for excitement.”

  Tooth privately doubted very much whether MI5 would welcome Chapman as a permanent addition to its ranks, but noted that at least the young man was feeling positive: “Previously, he had39 no faith in the existence of a future for him, and had little desire for it.” Having achieved one mission—reuniting with Freda and his child—Chapman was now eager to complete the next, the fake sabotage of the De Havilland factory.

  “What a man!”40 wrote Ronnie Reed, on learning that Operation Freda had succeeded beyond all expectations. “It is extraordinary41 how obvious a course of action seems after it has been taken. The introduction of a specific woman into the case overcame nearly all difficulty and re-orientated the whole picture of his emotional problems and his attitude to life.” By an odd coincidence, it was discovered that Chapman’s divorce from Vera Freidberg had been made absolute during his time in prison. He promptly proposed to Freda, who sensibly suggested that they might wait until after he had returned from active service.

  There was more than mere altruism in MI5’s pleasure at the turn of events: An Eddie Chapman with a fiancée and child in Britain was far less likely to defect to Germany. Given his previous record, Chapman’s marriage proposal today might well be forgotten tomorrow, but as Reed noted sagely, “this resolution provides42 a strong incentive for him to return to Allied Territory.” Chapman’s British spymasters were, on the whole, honorable and upright men, but they knew a useful lever when they saw one. Just as the Germans held Faramus as a hostage for Chapman’s loyalty, so MI5 could now be expected to look after Freda, just so long as Chapman behaved himself. Of course, the matter was never expressed in such bald terms. There was no need to be so vulgar.

  As for Freda, perhaps she genuinely never realized her pivotal role in the unfolding drama, nor imagined that the polite gentleman visitors who treated her so courteously had an ulterior motive; maybe she never asked any questions because she really never suspected a thing. But then again, Freda was a born survivor, and if she did understand the part she was playing, she was far too canny to say so.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Abracadabra

  PERSUADING THE GERMANS that the De Havilland aircraft factory had been wrecked, without causing any real damage, would require some powerful magic. So a magician was summoned. Enter Jasper
Maskelyne: professional conjurer, star of the West End, and Britain’s most flamboyant secret weapon. Maskelyne came from a long line of magicians, alchemists, and astronomers (his grandfather had been a celebrated stage conjurer in Victorian Britain), and by the 1930s he was already well known as a master illusionist, specializing in sleight of hand and exposing the fraudulent claims of spiritualists. He was also a skilled inventor (one of his most lasting gifts to humanity is the coin-operated toilet door. When you “spend a penny,” you owe it to Jasper Maskelyne). He looked as a conjurer ought, with a lacquered center part in his hair, film-star mustache, top hat, and magic wand. He was very clever, and insufferably vain.

  When he first offered to contribute his magical skills to the war effort, he was dismissed as a showman (which he was) and put to work entertaining the troops. But eventually General Archibald Wavell, the imaginative commander of British forces in North Africa, realized that Maskelyne’s talents might be applied to the battlefield. Maskelyne was sent to the Western Desert, where he assembled “the Magic Gang,” possibly the most eccentric military unit ever formed, whose members included an analytical chemist, a cartoonist, a criminal, a stage designer, a picture restorer, a carpenter, and a lone professional soldier to fill out the military paperwork. The gang set about bamboozling the enemy. They built fake submarines and Spitfires, disguised tanks as trucks, and successfully hid part of the Suez Canal using a system of revolving mirrors and searchlights that created a blinding vortex in the sky nine miles wide.

  For his greatest trick, Maskelyne helped to win the Battle of El Alamein by creating an entire array of “tricks, swindles and devices” to convince Erwin Rommel that the British counterattack was coming from the south, rather than the north. In 1942, the Magic Gang built over two thousand dummy tanks and constructed a bogus water pipeline to water this phony army. The half-built pipeline was easily spotted from the air, and the slow progress of its construction seems to have convinced the Germans that no attack was possible before November. Rommel went home on leave, and the attack started on October 23. After the victory, Churchill praised the “marvellous system of camouflage” that had helped to make it possible.

  This, then, was the ideal person to help make the De Havilland factory disappear in a puff of smoke. According to Charles Fraser-Smith, a supplier of military gadgets to the secret services who would later be immortalized as “Q” in the James Bond novels, Maskelyne was called in to make it “look, from the air,1 as if the place had been blown to Kingdom Come.” In consultation with Tar Robertson and Colonel Sir John Turner, head of the Air Ministry camouflage section, a plan for faking the sabotage of the factory began to take shape.

  At first, the planners contemplated laying asbestos sheets across the roof and then simply starting a large fire, which would surely be spotted by German reconnaissance. Masterman vetoed this idea, pointing out that the flames would make a very tempting target for the Luftwaffe, with the “danger that the Germans2 may try to bomb the factory while the fire is burning.” Instead, it was decided to erect a veil of camouflage so convincing that it would seem, from the ground as well as from the air, as if a very large bomb had exploded inside the factory power plant.

  The camouflage technicians constructed four replicas of sub-transformers out of wood and papier-mâché, painted a metallic gray. Two of these would be rolled over, as if blown sideways by the force of the blast. Meanwhile, the real transformers would be covered with netting and corrugated iron sheets painted to look, from high above, like a “vast hole”3 in the ground. On the night of the deception, the large green wooden gates to the transformer building would be replaced by a pair of mangled and broken green gates. The walls of the smaller building would be draped with tarpaulins, painted to look like the half-demolished remnants of a brick wall, while the other walls would be covered in soot, as if blackened from an explosion. Rubble and debris would be spread around the compound to a radius of a hundred feet. Colonel Turner assured Tar that the reconnaissance pilots, as well as any German agent sent to inspect the damage, would be utterly fooled.

  Chapman tapped out a message to von Gröning: FFFFF WALTER READY4 TO GO. BEGIN PREPARATIONS FOR MY RETURN. F.

  Military meteorologists studied the weather forecast and the passage of the moon, and decreed that the attack would be best staged on the night of January 29–30, when there should be little cloud cover (allowing the Germans to see what had been done) but long hours of darkness. That night, the moon would not rise until 2:30 in the morning, giving the conjurers at least three hours of darkness in which to perform.

  Building a convincing stage set was only half of the production. To convince the Germans, the press reviews would have to be fixed as well, and for that only one newspaper would suffice: the Times— “The Thunderer,” the organ of the British establishment. Chapman had arranged to send Stephan von Gröning messages through the Times; MI5 would now employ the same direct method of communication to feed him a lie.

  The editor of the Times was Robert Barrington-Ward, a pillar of press probity who shared the same alma mater as John Masterman. Even so, Masterman warned that getting Barrington-Ward to play ball might be “extremely difficult.”5 Masterman briefly laid the situation before him, emphasized the importance of the deception, and then asked if the newspaper would agree to “publish a small paragraph6 on the Saturday morning following the incident.” Barrington-Ward refused, politely, regretfully, and adamantly, observing that “though he would like to help, the suggestion that he should insert what was in fact a bogus notice in The Times cut across his whole policy. Not only the reputation but the public utility of The Times depended entirely on the principle that it should never insert any items of news which it did not believe to be true.” Masterman remonstrated. The single paragraph deception was such “a small thing in itself.” But Barrington-Ward did not budge: “The answer is respectfully no.”

  The editor of the Times was technically right: When an independent newspaper, even in wartime, deliberately publishes falsehoods, it ceases to be either independent or a newspaper. Barrington-Ward also dissuaded Masterman from trying to “plant” the false story in the press via the Ministry of Information, since this would either involve lying to the newspapers or, worse, letting journalists in on the ruse, a strategy certain to end in disaster since most hacks are, by nature, incapable of keeping a secret. Instead, Barrington-Ward advised Masterman to make a “private approach” to others of his profession who might adhere to less firm ethical principles: the Daily Telegraph, perhaps, or the Daily Express. Masterman was not used to being lectured on ethics. Somewhat embarrassed, the two men shook hands and agreed they would both regard the negotiation as “not having taken place.”

  Arthur Christiansen, editor of the Daily Express, was either less fastidious or more patriotic, or both. He, too, pointed out that the hoax “meant him deliberately publishing7 something in the paper which he knew was not true,” but he was happy to oblige. Indeed, he relished the idea of pulling the wool over German eyes, but pointed out that under wartime censorship rules he was not supposed to publish anything likely to encourage the enemy. Reporting the destruction of a vital aircraft factory was firmly in the category of unprintable news, and if he did so, “the censors,8 as soon as they saw the paragraph, would be shouting down his ’phone.” They struck a compromise: Christiansen would publish the fake report, but only in his earliest edition, which was sent to Lisbon, from whence it would be distributed, via the German consulate, to Germany and the occupied territories. If the Germans ever discovered that the notice had appeared only in the first edition, they would simply conclude the censor had spotted it and forced the editor to cut it out of later editions. Masterman drafted a one-paragraph account of a news event that had not happened, and never would. Christiansen, chuckling, translated it into journalese.

  Chapman sent a message alerting von Gröning to the planned date of the sabotage: FFFFF ARRANGEMENTS9 FOR WALTER ARE NOW COMPLETE. OBJECTIVES ARE SUBSTATIONS.
>
  The last elements of the elaborate deception were slotted into place. Fighter Command was instructed to watch out for reconnaissance planes over the Hatfield area, but on no account to attack them. If any factory employees asked about the painted tarpaulins, the factory owner would say that this was part of a test “to see if high altitude10 photography can pick up minor damage.” If the press turned up, they should be told that “something had occurred,11 but very small and not worthwhile reporting.” That should get the rumor mill grinding.

  As darkness fell, a team of camouflage experts slipped into the De Havilland aircraft factory and set about perpetrating the fraud. It seems likely that Maskelyne led the team, though he may simply have watched from the wings. That was typical of the man: Now you saw him, and now you didn’t. This was prestidigitation on an industrial scale, yet in a few hours the camouflage team was finished, and Ronnie Reed watched them disappear into the “inky blackness.”12 Shortly before midnight, the people of Hatfield were woken by a loud explosion.

  Dawn broke on a panorama of devastation. The site of the bogus blast was “surrounded by chaos,” in Reed’s words. Brick, rubble, bent iron, lumps of concrete, and splintered wood were spread around the substation courtyard. From the side, the smaller building appeared to have been struck with a giant mallet, while the dummy transformers lay smashed among the debris, like the guts of some vast disemboweled animal. Even the boiler-room operator was convinced, for he arrived at the factory office “in a state of great excitement,”13 shouting that the building had been struck by a bomb. A screen was swiftly erected, as if to keep out prying eyes.

  Tar Robertson surveyed the conjurer’s handiwork and professed himself delighted. “The whole picture was very convincing,” wrote Reed. “Aerial photography from any height above 2,000 feet would show considerable devastation without creating any suspicion.” The weather conditions were not ideal, with thick cloud cover, but if “the other side paid a visit” they would witness a “scene of destruction,” a con trick painted on canvas. This, wrote Fraser-Smith, was “Maskelyne’s masterpiece.”14