Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  On March 8, 1944, eleven months after coming to Norway, Chapman boarded a plane bound for Berlin, the first stop en route to Paris, and then England. His parting from Dagmar was agonizing. Chapman faced an uncertain future, but he left Dagmar in multiple jeopardy, employed and secretly paid as an unofficial British agent, but ostensibly “kept” by the German Abwehr. If Chapman’s betrayal was discovered, then she, too, would fall under German suspicion. If Germany lost the war, her countrymen might seek reprisals against her for “fraternising.” Dagmar wept, but insisted she was not afraid. If Norwegians mocked her, she would tell them to “mind their own business.”20 If the “Mrs. Gossips”21 back in Eidsvoll wanted to cluck and mutter in their kitchens, so be it. They exchanged promises: She would keep her word, and he would come back for her, one day.

  As they sped toward Berlin, von Gröning and Chapman went over the details of the mission. His code, as before, would be the “double transposition22 operation type,” based on the code word ANTICHURCHDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM (Chapman was never one to make life easy for the German receivers). The days and times of transmission would be worked out using a formula based on a fragment of a line from the First World War song “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty”: “Liverpool, Leeds, or Birmingham,23 well, I don’t [care]…” All that remained was to establish a control signal, a word or phrase that would indicate he was operating freely. Chapman had already made his choice. Free messages would always contain the word “DAGMAR,” the equivalent of the FFFFF sign used on his first mission. Von Gröning duly informed Paris and Berlin: “If the message does not include24 the word Dagmar, the agent is operating under control.”

  Implicit in Chapman’s control signal was a coded warning to his German handlers: If anything should happen to Dagmar, then all bets were off.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Lunch at the Lutétia

  ZIGZAG HAD VANISHED, and was presumed dead. There had been a brief surge of hope when the Most Secret Sources reported that the Lisbon Abwehr station had been asked to “provide a cover address1 for Fritzchen at Berlin’s request.” But the request was never followed up, and there was no further mention of Fritzchen. The radio listeners and codebreakers of Bletchley continued to scour the airwaves for any trace of the agent. Churchill himself demanded to be informed if and when he resurfaced. But there was nothing: nothing from Chapman himself, no indication from the Most Secret Sources that the German agent Fritz was still operative, and no sightings reported by the network of SOE spies spread throughout occupied France. The Nantes station seemed to have closed down, and von Gröning’s name no longer appeared in Abwehr wireless traffic. Chapman had probably broken under interrogation. Perhaps the failure to blow up the City of Lancaster had brought him under suspicion, or perhaps he had been betrayed by a British mole. Men like Masterman and Robertson were not sentimental, yet the thought of what Chapman may have endured before execution gave them pause for thought.

  On the freezing morning of May 5, 1944, on the rocky coast of Iceland, a seal hunter spotted three men “whose appearance and activities2 seemed to him suspicious.” They did not look like seal hunters, they were not hunting seals, and no other sane person would be trudging through the snowy dawn at ten degrees Fahrenheit below zero. The hunter informed the local sheriff, who told the American commander stationed nearby, who sent out an expedition “into the wastelands”3 to investigate. They found the three men quickly, which was just as well, for they had almost frozen to death. The leader of the luckless little band was German, and the other two were Icelanders who admitted, after some “guttural protestations4 of innocence,” that their names were Björnsson and Júlíusson.

  The German, Ernst Christoph Fresnius, claimed to be gathering meteorological information for a German shipping institute, but it did not take long to persuade the bovine Björnsson to confess that they had hidden a radio transmitter and a pedal-operated generator in a nearby cave. All three were shipped to Camp 020 in London, where Stephens swiftly extracted the truth, playing Fresnius off against his “unsubtle retainers.”5 It was only a matter of hours before Stephens learned that the trio had been sent to monitor and report on troop movements, confirming that the Germans were “worried still6 about the possible use of Iceland as a base for continental invasion.”

  So far the case seemed predictable, but when Björnsson and Júlíusson began to describe their training at a spy school in Norway, Stephens suddenly sat up and paid attention. The wireless instructor in Oslo, they said, had been a “mysterious figure,7 speaking bad German in a rather loud high-pitched voice, clad in a pepper-and-salt summer suit, displaying two gold teeth and enjoying the amenities of a private yacht.” There was only one person in the world with that combination of dentistry and sartorial taste. Photographs of Chapman were produced, and Björnsson and Júlíusson identified their Oslo radio instructor without hesitation. The Double Cross team was overjoyed. Even dry, hard John Masterman hailed the return of “an old friend”8 from his monkish cell at the Reform Club. Zigzag had darted back onto MI5’s radar. But what—with his sharp new suit and private yacht—was he up to?

  Since Chapman’s last trip to Berlin, the German capital had been thrashed and crushed by repeated and ferocious aerial bombardment. Between November 1943 and March 1944, Britain’s Bomber Command had launched 16 massed attacks on the German capital, deploying up to 800 long-range bombers. Some 4,000 Berliners were killed, 10,000 injured, and 450,000 rendered homeless. A quarter of the city’s living accommodation was gone, along with Kaiser Wilhelm Church, the SS Administrative College, Charlottenburg Castle, and the Berlin Zoo. The city was barely recognizable as Chapman and von Gröning drove down shattered streets through “mountains of rubble,” rank with the stench of leaking gas, smoke, and putrefaction. “The whole city9 reeked of fire. It was like the ruins of Pompeii,” Chapman reflected. The faces of the Berliners were gouged with “resignation and misery.”10

  Chapman and von Gröning checked into the Metropol Hotel on Friedrichstrasse, and after a meager meal of tinned meat, they were driven, past the bombed remnants of the Berlin Bank and the Kaiserhof Hotel, to the Luftwaffe headquarters—a huge concrete monolith of a building on Leipzigerstrasse. On the fifth floor, a Luftwaffe captain displayed the fragments of electrical instruments retrieved from British aircraft, including a dashboard-mounted screen with which, he explained, the enemy could apparently “locate our night fighters11 and bombers with the greatest of ease.” The intelligence officer had only a vague notion of where these machines might be found, suggesting that Chapman might try “Cossors of Hammersmith,”12 the military manufacturer, or else locate a fighter base in England and obtain the device by theft or bribery.

  Again Chapman was struck by the faith in his criminal talents: “The Germans left it entirely to [my] sagacity to get through, with the aid of former pals.” Moreover, with every official he met, the scope of his mission to England expanded. He was now introduced to another officer who explained that the Luftwaffe command believed that bombers at certain British airfields were assigned to bomb specific German cities. As a subsidiary mission, Chapman, or one of his gang, should spy on the air bases in Cambridgeshire and try to ascertain the RAF’s bombing schedule. A civilian named Weiss then gave Chapman a four-hour lecture on “radio-controlled rockets and flying bombs.” This was the first Chapman had heard of these terrifying pilotless bombs intended to blast Britain, finally, into submission. All countries were now racing to deploy such weapons, Weiss explained, in what would be the war’s fiery finale. Chapman’s task would be to find out if Britain had yet produced flying bombs, and when it intended to use them.

  That night, in the hotel on Friedrichstrasse, Chapman and von Gröning gazed out of the window of the Metropole Hotel, the only building still standing in the neighborhood, “an island in a sea of rubble.” From the exhaustion on the faces of Berliners, the appalling wreckage of the city, and the fantastical expectations pinned to Chapman’s assignment, both men had reached
the same conclusion: Germany was facing defeat and desperately attempting to turn the tide before the imminent continental invasion. Von Gröning now “made no secret of the fact that he expected Germany to lose the war,” and he confided that he had begun “converting much of13 his money into articles of value”—assets that could be moved easily in the unpredictable aftermath of defeat—and stashing them in his mansion in Bremen. The flying bombs represented a last reckless gamble, von Gröning said, but the Nazi propaganda machine was still predicting total victory. “If their weapons14 are not successful,” he added soberly, “the reaction will be enormous.”

  Chapman and von Gröning were ordered to proceed to Paris and await instructions: Chapman was lodged once more at the Grand Hotel, while von Gröning stayed at the Lutétia, the SS headquarters on the boulevard Raspail. Agonizing suspense followed. The delay, von Gröning explained with frustration, was “due to the inability or reluctance of the Luftwaffe to find a plane.” Chapman wandered the streets of Paris and beheld a city broken in morale and spirit, racked by oppression, with the black market, hunger, and disease thriving. There was growing French resentment at the Allied bombing raids that killed Germans and ordinary civilians indiscriminately, and little enthusiasm for the expected invasion. In the cafés, Chapman heard people mutter: “Life under the Germans is preferable to having no homes.”

  In mid-April, word came through that Chapman would fly from Brussels. He and von Gröning scrambled to Belgium by train, only to learn that the flight had been called off “owing to the danger15 of interception by night-fighters.” They trailed disconsolately back to Paris. In May, there was a fresh flurry, when Chapman was informed he would be dropped near Plymouth during a German bombing sortie, but again he was stood down. The Allied invasion could begin any day, von Gröning told him, and “if he landed in England16 before it started, his first and most important mission would be to discover the date and place [of the attack].” Although von Gröning expected Germany to lose the war eventually, he, along with most Germans in occupied France, remained airily confident that Germany’s Channel defenses could “repel any attack.”

  Adding to the tension, Chapman had been allocated a new “shadow,” in the shape of a young, slightly built man from the Lutétia known as Kraus, or Krausner. Von Gröning warned Chapman that Kraus, a homosexual who frequented the Paris underworld, had a reputation as a spy catcher and had trapped more enemy agents than anyone else in German counterespionage, and was “astute in posing off-hand questions.” Like every other German officer, he had a task for Chapman—the delivery of a camera and money to an agent already established in Britain.

  One evening after dinner, Kraus asked nonchalantly if Chapman knew Dennis Wheatley, the British thriller writer. Chapman said he had met him. “Is he working17 for British Intelligence?” asked Kraus.

  Chapman pretended to be indignant: “How the hell18 should I know?” Chapman did not know, as Kraus evidently did, that Wheatley had become a key member of the London Controlling Section, the top secret nerve center organizing strategic deception under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel John Bevan.

  On a Sunday morning in the place Pigalle, Chapman recognized a fellow former hostage from Romainville, a young Algerian named Amalou. That evening, they met in a café in the Latin Quarter called Le Refuge, where Amalou explained that he had been released from the prison after Chapman; he didn’t know why, nor why he had been arrested in the first place. When Chapman asked for news of Anthony Faramus, Amalou shrugged sadly. Faramus had been taken from the prison a few months after Chapman. No one knew if he was alive or dead.

  Faramus was now in the Mauthausen concentration camp. At Buchenwald, he had been starved, frozen in his ersatz tunic and wood-soled shoes, beaten, and worked in the slave gangs until he collapsed. “If and when I come19 to my end,” he had reflected, “the remains of my body will be dragged across the muck to the outside and dumped at a spot from which, later on, the crematorium wagon will come to fetch it.” Faramus had calculated that he might have “approximately six months20 of natural life left” when, for no reason he could discern, he was loaded on to another train, and transferred to Mauthausen, the vast labor camp in Upper Austria.

  Here, conditions were, if anything, worse than in Buchenwald, for this was truly, in the words of Faramus, “an extermination camp,21 a boneyard.” The Mauthausen-Gusen complex of camps was intended to be the most hideous of all: Here, the “Enemies of the Reich,” the intelligentsia, and others could be exterminated by lethal labor. Disease, violence, brutality, and the gas chambers killed relentlessly. Over fifty-six thousand people perished at Buchenwald; as many as three hundred thousand may have died at Mauthausen. Some workers sought death: Skeleton-slaves working in the quarries at Mauthausen would wait for their guards to be distracted, find the heaviest boulder they could lift, and hurl themselves off the cliff sides. Others, like Tony Faramus, his leg ulcerated and poisoned, his body riddled by disease, waited listlessly for the end. While Chapman wondered what had happened to his friend, Faramus was also racked by wonder: “All the time,22 I wondered—why? Why such bestiality? What was the purpose of it all?”

  A few days after the meeting with Amalou, Kraus casually remarked to Chapman that he would like to visit Le Refuge in the Latin Quarter. Chapman was stunned. He began “to think furiously.”23 Had he been followed to the café? Had he said anything to Amalou that could expose him? Had he put himself, or Faramus, in deeper danger by inquiring after his friend? Was Amalou an informer? Chapman suggested that they go to the Lido instead, and an unpleasantly “knowing”24 smile darted across the face of Kraus.

  Shortly afterward, a letter from Dagmar arrived, saying she was “having a good time25 and had met a certain Sturmbannführer,” the agreed-upon code that she was still being paid and was not under suspicion. The letter had already been opened.

  On June 6, 1944, the Allies invaded northern France in the largest seaborne invasion ever launched. Operation Overlord was supported by Operation Fortitude, the deception carried out by the Double Cross team. For months, the double agents of B1A had been feeding disinformation to the Germans indicating that the invasion would be aimed at the Pas de Calais region. In addition, leaked diplomatic misinformation, false wireless traffic, and fake infrastructure in the form of wooden tanks and landing craft were all used to bolster German belief that the attack would be aimed at the southern part of the coast, while Fortitude North sought to plant the expectation of a simultaneous assault on Norway. German reserves were kept back in preparation to defend Calais from an attack that never came. Instead, Allied troops poured into Normandy, wrong-footing the enemy in one of the most successful wartime deceptions ever achieved.

  D-Day changed everything, including Chapman’s mission. MI5 had come to believe Chapman could achieve “the unbelievable” in parts of the Abwehr, there seems to have been a growing belief that he could work miracles. In the fervid days following the invasion, the German spy chiefs even discussed infiltrating Fritz into the Normandy beachhead to operate behind the lines, with “any uniform he liked26 (that of a padre was suggested), any money he wanted, and the assistance of other agents.” Berlin sent instructions that he should find the code used in transmissions between ships “for the shelling of27 coastal towns by the navy in support of the land forces.” The plan foundered when it was pointed out that even a spy of Chapman’s resource would find it hard to swim out to a ship in the middle of a bloody conflict disguised as a military chaplain, and then steal top secret codes.

  It was agreed that Chapman should instead train a team of fifth columnists to be left behind in Paris if the Germans retreated. He was set to work teaching Morse to two women volunteers who proved entirely unsuited to the task: one, an excitable Italian ballet dancer called Monica; the other, a former typist named Gisella. Chapman noted with admiration Monica’s “dimples,”28 but he began to suspect that he was now marooned within the frantic German military bureaucracy.

  Von Gröning
was also depressed. He told Chapman that he was convinced he would “never leave,”29 but he had other reasons to worry: The Abwehr was no more. Following yet further evidence linking Abwehr officers to anti-Nazi activities, Hitler had pounced. He had summoned Canaris and accused him of allowing the secret service to “fall to bits.”30 Canaris had shot back that this was hardly surprising as Germany was losing the war. Hitler fired Canaris immediately, shifting him to a meaningless position. The Abwehr was abolished, and its operations absorbed into the RSHA—the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Security Main Office”)—under Himmler’s SS. Von Gröning found himself no longer working for the liberal Canaris but under the control of Walter Schellenberg, chief of the SS foreign intelligence service.

  In his gloom, von Gröning even contemplated his own spy mission, declaring that he would volunteer to stay behind in the event of a retreat and pose as a French antiques salesman to coordinate the fifth column. Chapman put this plan down to an “excess of brandy.”31 Chapman tried to cheer him up, and for his birthday he bought him an engraved ivory statuette as a memento of their stay in Paris.

  In June, Germany produced its long-feared counterpunch, unleashing on London the first of its flying bombs, or V-1s (the “V” standing for Vergeltungswaffe—“reprisal weapon”). “Terrible devastation will ensue,”32 von Gröning predicted, “since nothing could survive the explosion within a 4,000 meter radius.” The destruction would be such that if Chapman ever did reach Britain, he might be unable to use his radio, since all power plants would be destroyed. On the thirteenth, the first day of the flying-bomb barrage, the German and the Englishman tuned in to the BBC to hear the reports of the damage. Von Gröning’s face fell: The bombing was the last item of news, the reference to Hitler’s new weapon “slight,”33 even nonchalant. There had been “few casualties.”34 The broadcaster was lying (more than six thousand British civilians would die from V-1 attacks over the next nine months) but it was a fine piece of propaganda. Von Gröning dismissed it as such, but he admitted that the flying bombs would prove “a flop”35 unless their effectiveness could be properly assessed.