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Agent Zigzag

Page 32

by Ben MacIntyre


  Chapman had repeatedly risked his life for the British secret services. He had provided invaluable intelligence for the Allied war effort. He had penetrated the upper echelons of the German secret service, and helped disrupt V-weapon attacks on central London. Even now, German intelligence officers were poring over documents, furnished by Zigzag, describing a nonexistent antisubmarine weapon. He had extracted some £7,000 from the Nazi exchequer—$430,000 at modern prices—and cost the British government almost nothing. But he was also a criminal, expendable, and quite the wrong sort of person, in the eyes of many, to be hailed as a hero. This was the man MI5 would now “dispose of” if he dared to bother them again.

  The Zigzag case was closed, and on November 28, 1944, at the age of thirty, Chapman’s career as a secret agent came to an abrupt and permanent end. That evening, over dinner at his club with fellow officers, Major Ryde reviewed the fall of Eddie Chapman with placid self-satisfaction, concluding that “Zigzag should be thankful21 we are not going to lock him up.”

  Tin Eye Stephens, however, saw Zigzag differently: Chapman was the worst of men, in whom war had brought out the best. Years later, Stephens wrote: “Fiction has not,22 and probably never will, produce an espionage story to rival in fascination and improbability the true story of Edward Chapman, whom only war could invest with virtue, and that only for its duration.” In Germany, Stephan von Gröning waited in vain for a message from his agent and friend. When the Nazis retreated, he continued to listen and hope, and as Hitler’s regime crumbled around him, he was listening still.

  Chapman, by rights and inclination, might have been expected to react to his sacking with indignation. Another man might have felt the sting of rejection, the cold humiliation of the double cross. But, as always, Chapman zigged when another man would have zagged. In truth, MI5’s ungrateful farewell had set him free at last. He was no longer in thrall to either the German or the British secret services. He had money and a medal from the former, and an informal pardon from the latter; no other secret agent could claim to have been rewarded in this way by both sides. MI5 had threatened dire reprisals if he revealed his story, but he knew that one day it would be told.

  Chapman returned to what he knew best, for Britain at the end of the war was a criminal’s cornucopia. Through his old networks, he came into contact with Billy Hill, a nightclub owner and underworld boss who styled himself the “King of Soho.” Hill had spent the war setting up some profitable black market and protection rackets. He was a “hard character23 with considerable dash and more verve,” in Chapman’s view, and the ideal ally. Making money by drugging greyhounds was strictly a pastime. New moneymaking schemes beckoned. Chapman and Hill went into partnership.

  Dismissal from his country’s service also left Chapman free to pursue matters of the heart once more, for he had conceived yet another romantic quest. This time the focus was not Dagmar (who waited in Oslo); nor Freda (who continued to draw her stipend from MI5); nor his ex-wife, Vera; nor Anita, the Portuguese prostitute from George’s Bar. Chapman was now determined to find Betty Farmer, the girl he had left behind at the Hotel de la Plage, nearly six years earlier. Perhaps she was dead; perhaps she was married, or had moved away. But Chapman knew that if he could find Betty, and she would let him, he could make amends.

  Chapman contacted Paul Backwell and Allan Tooth, the two former policemen who had served as his minders, and asked for their help. He also recruited a private detective, Doughy Baker. The search began to obsess Chapman, driving out every other thought, and every other woman: “Uppermost in my mind24 was the desire to find Betty, my girl, whom I had last seen when I dived through a hotel window before my arrest.” Backwell and Tooth traced Betty only as far as a hotel on the Isle of Man in 1943. Her family thought she was working in a factory somewhere near London. A friend said Betty had been walking out with a Spitfire pilot, who was shot down in the sea off Margate.

  Chapman arranged a summit meeting to discuss the search for Betty Farmer. Over lunch at the fashionable Berkeley Hotel (Chapman was as profligate and generous as ever), the ex-policemen explained that searching for a single woman in the chaos of wartime Britain was no easy task, particularly without a photograph: “Is there anyone25 here who looks like her at all?” Chapman looked around the dining room, with its lunchtime clientele of debs and guardsmen, bankers and mobsters. He pointed to a slim woman with blond hair, seated at a corner table, her back to the room. “That girl,”26 he said, “looks exactly like her from the back.” At that moment, the woman turned around.

  “Jesus!”27 exclaimed Chapman. “It is Betty. Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  Backwell and Tooth, discreet to the last, slipped away, as a waiter swept up the remains of a coffee cup that had dropped from Betty Farmer’s astonished fingers when a man she had last seen in a Jersey courtroom tapped her on the shoulder. Chapman pulled up a chair.

  “I shall go,”28 he had told her in the distant days before the war. “But I shall always come back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Aftermath

  WITH THE END of the war, the Double Cross team was quietly disbanded. It would be decades before anyone outside the Most Secret circle knew it had existed. A few eventually emerged from the shadows of British intelligence to tell their stories and reap some glory, but most did not.

  Tommy “Tar” Robertson gave up the spy game, and spent the rest of his life farming sheep in Worcestershire. The “real genius”1 of the double-cross operation was awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit by Harry Truman, the Royal Order of the Yugoslav Crown by King Peter in a bizarre ceremony at Claridge’s, and an Order of the British Empire from Britain for work too secret to be described. John Masterman, muscle-bound by duty, considered Tar’s early retirement to be “one of the greatest2 losses which MI5 ever suffered,” but Robertson was entirely happy tending his sheep. He stopped wearing tartan trousers, but he continued to talk to strange characters in pubs. When Tar died in 1994, a small poem was offered as an epitaph to the spymaster who never lost the knack of listening.

  Blessed are they3 with cheery smile

  Who stop to chat for a little while.

  Blessed are they who never say:

  “You’ve told me that story twice today.”

  John Cecil Masterman, who liked lecturing more than listening, was knighted, feted, and awarded the OBE. He returned to Oxford, his clubs, his cricket, and his mystery novels. He became provost of Worcester College, and then vice chancellor of Oxford. In 1957, he published another detective novel, The Case of the Four Friends, featuring a character called Chapman, which discussed the nature of the criminal mind: “To work out the crime4 before it is committed, to foresee how it will be arranged, and then prevent it! That’s a triumph indeed.” He sat on industrial boards and accepted governorships at the major public schools, a stalwart member of the great and good. “Everything which is good5 in this curious world owes its origin to privileged persons,” he maintained.

  But in 1970, for the first time in his life, Masterman broke ranks with the ruling classes by publishing a book about the Double-Cross organization. His account had been written immediately after the war, strictly for internal MI5 reading, but he had secretly kept a copy for himself. The spy scandals of the 1960s had shattered the morale of the British intelligence community, and Masterman was determined to restore some of its confidence by relating this story of unalloyed success. Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, and Alec Douglas-Home, the prime minister, refused to authorize publication, so Masterman published The Double-Cross System in the War, 1939–1945 in the United States, where the Official Secrets Act could not stifle it. Many establishment figures, including some of Masterman’s former colleagues in MI5, were scandalized; John Marriott never spoke to him again. In 1972, the British government bowed, and the book was published, subject to the removal of a number of contentious passages. “How strange it was,”6 wrote Masterman, “that I, who all my life, had been a supporter of the Establishment, should become, at eighty
, a successful rebel.”

  Others followed suit: Ewen Montagu published his account of Operation Mincemeat, the successful deception plan that had convinced the Germans the Allies intended to invade the Balkans and Sardinia rather than Sicily. Montagu, by then judge advocate of the fleet, even played a cameo role in the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was.

  Paul Backwell, Chapman’s wartime minder, became a captain in the Intelligence Corps, and Allan Tooth remained a senior NCO in the Field Security Service.

  Ronnie Reed accepted a job with MI5 after the war as senior technical adviser to the security service. Between 1951 and 1957, he headed the counterespionage section, responsible for investigating Soviet moles in Britain, including the Burgess, Maclean, and Philby cases. Reed officially retired in 1977, but was invited to stay on in MI5 as a senior adviser. He later wrote the definitive monograph on wartime radio work, which was published as an appendix to the official account of British Intelligence in the Second World War. Reed was much too self-effacing to put his name to it. He died in 1995, at the age of seventy-eight. The Iron Cross presented to Chapman by von Gröning for services to the Third Reich, and then passed on to Reed as a souvenir of their friendship, remains in the possession of the Reed family.

  Victor, Lord Rothschild, won the George Medal for his wartime work with explosives, joined the Zoology Department at Cambridge University, and went on to become security adviser to Margaret Thatcher. His student membership in the Cambridge Apostles, and his links with the KGB spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, led to allegations that he was the “Fifth Man” in the Cambridge Spy Ring. He furiously denied the charges, and published an open letter to British newspapers in 1986 stating: “I am not, and never7 have been, a Soviet agent.”

  Michael Ryde, Chapman’s last case officer, left MI5 soon after the war and rejoined the family firm of chartered surveyors. He soon drank himself out of a job, however, and began a sad descent into alcoholism. One marriage disintegrated, and he walked out of the next, leaving two young children. In the pub, to general disbelief, Ryde would boast of his role in the case of Eddie Chapman, a man he had despised.

  Terence Young survived the Battle of Arnhem to become a highly successful filmmaker, and directed the first and second James Bond films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love (in which a Russian spy develops a plan to kill Bond and steal a coding machine). The persona of the world’s most famous secret agent was probably based on Young himself, with some cast members remarking that “Sean Connery was simply8 doing a Terence Young impression.”

  Jasper Maskelyne, the conjurer, virtually vanished after the war, to his intense irritation. He received no decoration, no formal recognition for his deception schemes, and official accounts of the North African campaign barely mentioned him. The audiences for his magic shows grew smaller, and the venues steadily less glamorous. Embittered, he gave up magic, emigrated to Kenya, set up a successful driving school, took part in the campaign against the Mau Mau rebels, and died in 1973.

  Reginald Kearon, captain of the City of Lancaster, went on to take command of five more merchant vessels in the course of the war. He was awarded the OBE for war service and the Lloyd’s War Medal. The sea kept trying, and failing, to claim him: in 1948, unsinkable Reg Kearon went on a solo pleasure cruise in the Mediterranean and was later found “drifting on a wreck9 in Haifa Bay.” He retired in 1954, the same year that the City of Lancaster (renamed Lancastrian) was broken up.

  From 1945, Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens ran Bad Nenndorf, the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) near Hanover, a secret prison set up following the British occupation of northwestern Germany. This was the German version of Camp 020, where Tin Eye was charged with flushing the truth out of the numerous intelligence officers and spies picked up as the Allies pushed into Germany, including Himmler’s assistant, Walter Schellenberg, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich’s successor as head of the RSHA (a “giant of evil”10 in Stephens’s view). Tin Eye was accused of using brutal methods to extract confessions, but he was acquitted of all charges, having damned his accusers as “degenerates, most of them11 diseased by VD [and] pathological liars.”

  Stephan von Gröning was arrested by American forces and held in a prison camp outside Bremen. Homeless, he had been staying with his sister Dorothea and her adopted Jewish daughter when the soldiers arrived. The Americans got lost escorting him to the prison, so the half-American von Gröning showed them the way, in perfect English, with an upper-class accent. He was allowed to send one card a month to relatives. The man whose linen had always been ironed by servants found himself pleading for handkerchiefs and toothpaste. He was released after six months and discovered, to his intense annoyance, that in order to obtain a ration book, and thus to eat, he had to get a job. Through family friends, he was found nominal employment at the Bremen Museum, but he rarely turned up for work.

  The money may have all gone, but von Gröning lived on his name, “loyal to his own class”12 to the end. He married a much younger woman named Ingeborg, and though she worked, he did not. He would lie for long hours on the sofa, reading borrowed books. Von Gröning seldom spoke of the war. He believed Eddie Chapman had been captured, exposed as a spy, and executed. He kept a photograph of La Bretonnière in his wallet.

  Walter Praetorius, alias Thomas, the Nazi who loved folk dancing, was arrested, transferred to Bad Nenndorf, and interrogated by Tin Eye Stephens. Stephens considered the camp inmates to be “invariably foul,”13 but Praetorius impressed him, perhaps because his Anglomania chimed with Tin Eye’s raw jingoism. Praetorius was released after several months of interrogation, with the verdict that he had “had a long and possibly14 creditable record of service as a permanent official of the German Secret Service.” Praetorius settled in Goslar, West Germany, where he returned to teaching and dancing.

  On May 5, 1945, troops of the 41st U.S. Cavalry liberated Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and found a scene from hell—human skeletons staggering through an abandoned factory of death. Among the emaciated ghosts was Anthony Faramus. He had lost a lung and seven ribs, his body had been racked by diphtheria, scarlet fever, gangrene, and dysentery. But somehow the frail Jersey boy who blushed so easily had survived. Back in Britain, he was treated in an RAF hospital, and then discharged with £16 in cash and a weekly allowance of £2. He arranged to meet up with Eddie Chapman through the journalist Frank Owens, who witnessed their “awkward”15 meeting.

  “I thought you were dead,”16 said Chapman.

  “I thought so too, sometimes.”

  “How did you make out?”

  “Not so good.”

  “I was always worried about how you got on.”

  “I often felt the same way about you, Eddie, and wondered whether you’d make the grade. That was certainly a tricky game you were playing.”

  There was an embarrassed silence.

  “Where did you go?” asked Chapman.

  “Many places so bad, Eddie, that I was sometimes even tempted to give your game away to the Jerries. Anyway, rather than do those swine a favor, I kept quiet.”

  There was another long pause before Chapman said: “You know, Tony, if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t have had to go through all that.”

  Faramus had never betrayed Chapman, and Chapman had maintained the confidence of the Germans, in part, he believed, to protect Faramus. They went to a nearby pub and got very drunk. “Millions died17 without being able to utter a single word,” Chapman reflected to his friend. “We at least have lived to tell our stories.”

  Faramus wrote a harrowing memoir, and obtained work as a film extra. In a painfully ironic piece of casting, he played the part of a prisoner of war in the film The Colditz Story. The inhabitants of Colditz may have suffered, but never as he had done.

  Faramus emigrated to Hollywood—and ended up as Cary Grant’s butler.

  Dagmar Lahlum waited in vain for Chapman to come back, while Norway carried out a grim accounting. Vidkun Quisling was arrested at
his mansion, Gimli, tried for treason, and executed by a firing squad. Two members of the Norwegian resistance were tried for the murder of the Feltmans, but acquitted. Dagmar’s neighbors back in Eidsvoll whispered behind her back, and called her a “German tart.”18 She heard them, but said nothing. She never told her neighbors or family that she had assisted the British secret services during the war. To get away from the “Mrs. Gossips,”19 she took a job as an assistant nurse aboard the cruise ship Stvanger Fjord, which sailed between Oslo, New York, and Nova Scotia. She and Chapman had both learned to love the sea, and, like him, “she was always restless.”20 She worked in a bookshop, then as a hairdresser, and finally as an accountant. Dagmar still wore the most fashionable clothes, and smoked Craven A cigarettes. She never remarried, never had children, and never lost her looks. In old age, she wore makeup and leopard-skin hats, and once her niece caught her dancing alone in front of the mirror. When Dagmar died of Parkinson’s disease in 1999, her niece found a box of letters, carefully written out in English, on sheet after sheet of airmail paper. They were addressed to Eddie Chapman. None had ever been sent. Dagmar’s niece burned them all.

  Freda Stevenson, rightly, saw no point in waiting. She became a shorthand typist, and in 1949, she married a bank clerk five years her junior. Four years later, she had become a newsagent’s clerk, divorced her second husband, and married a wealthy garage proprietor called Abercrombie. Though the security service was careful to destroy the agreement under which she was to be paid £5 a month until further notice and removed all references from the files, Freda may have continued to receive checks from the London Co-operative Society, the fruits of Chapman’s deal with MI5, until the day she died. Like Faramus, Freda was a survivor.

 

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