Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  At the Berkeley Hotel, Eddie Chapman and Betty Farmer talked for hours, and got married shortly thereafter. It was a happy, enduring marriage, even though Chapman’s eye wandered more or less continuously for the next fifty years. He left often, but he always came back. A daughter, Suzanne, was born in October 1954.

  Zigzag never did go straight. After the war, he returned to the demimonde of London’s West End, where the wastrels welcomed him home. During the 1950s, he smuggled gold across the Mediterranean. After buying a share in Billy Hill’s yacht, the Flamingo, a former minesweeper, Chapman and a like-minded crew sailed to Morocco, where they became involved in a ludicrous plot to smuggle 850,000 packets of cigarettes and kidnap the deposed sultan. The plan collapsed when the villainous crew got into a dockside brawl, and they were expelled from Tangier, hotly pursued by a reporter from the Sunday Chronicle, whom they invited on board and then locked in his cabin. The Flamingo caught fire in the Toulon harbor, possibly for insurance purposes, giving rise to suspicions that Chapman’s sabotage skills had not deserted him. Soon after, the Hill gang knocked off a post-office van, escaping with £250,000. During the 1960s, Eddie and Betty Chapman moved to Africa’s Gold Coast. Chapman became involved in a complicated building contract. There was a corruption inquiry, but by then he had come home.

  Tin Eye Stephens had wondered “what will happen when21 Chapman, embroiled again in crime, as he inevitably will be, stands up in court and pleads leniency on the grounds of highly secret wartime service?” He duly found out. Chapman would appear in court repeatedly over the next twenty years, but he never returned to prison. When he was charged with passing forged currency in 1948, he produced a character reference from an unnamed “senior officer22 of the War office” stating that he was “one of the bravest men23 who served in the last war.” The referee was almost certainly Ronnie Reed. MI5 had not entirely welched on its debt. Again, in 1974, he was found not guilty of hitting a man on the head with a glass during a dance party at the Watersplash Hotel in the New Forest. The fight was over a young woman named Theresa Chin. Chapman told the court: “I was trained24 in unarmed combat for my wartime activities and I didn’t need a glass to defend myself in a pub brawl. I could have killed him with my bare hands.” When he was acquitted, he offered to buy the jury a drink.

  Chapman still mixed with blackmailers, high rollers, and low thieves. He drove a Rolls-Royce (though he never passed a driving test) and wore fur-collared coats. The newspapers loved him—“Eddie Chapman, the gentleman crook.” He was even, for a time, the “honorary crime correspondent”25 of the Sunday Telegraph, “whose readers he proceeded to warn against the attentions of people like him.” In 1960, a reporter asked him if he missed the old days of crime. “I do a bit,”26 he said wistfully. “I’ve no regrets. No conscience about anything I’ve done. I like to think I was an honest villain.”

  John Masterman once wrote: “Sometimes in life27 you feel that there is something which you must do, and in which you must trust your own judgment and not that of any other person. Some call it conscience and some plain obstinacy. Well, you can take your choice.” War, briefly, brought out in Chapman an obstinate conscience. His vices were as extreme as his virtues, and to the end of his life, it was never clear whether he was on the side of the angels or the devils, whether he deceived the deceivers, or whether he had made a pact with his German spymaster. He died in 1997 of heart failure, at the age of eighty-three. He may have ascended heavenward; or perhaps he headed in the opposite direction. He is probably zigzagging still.

  Chapman tried to publish an account of his wartime exploits, but like John Masterman he was blocked by MI5. He wrote a bowdlerized version of events that appeared in a French newspaper, L’Etoile, and then in the News of the World in 1953, but when Chapman strayed into official secrets, the government lawyers stepped in. He was fined £50, and an entire edition of the newspaper had to be pulped. A second attempt at publication was thwarted by D-Notice, the official government request to news editors not to publish for reasons of national security. Eventually, a ghosted and semifictionalized memoir, The Eddie Chapman Story, which described his time in Germany but not his MI5 work, appeared in 1954. “What is the truth28 about Eddie Chapman?” demanded the News of the World. “Why, if these astounding claims are true, was he not arrested and convicted as a traitor to his country?”

  Finally, in 1966, Chapman was allowed to publish another version, The Real Eddie Chapman Story, which referred, without giving details, to his work for MI5. This provided the basis for a rather poor film, Triple Cross, directed by Terence Young and starring Christopher Plummer as Chapman. The film bore only a superficial relation to the truth, and Chapman was disappointed by it. He never received the recognition he thought he deserved; but then, Chapman could probably only have achieved that level of recognition by assassinating Hitler. Somehow, he became rather rich, and for a while owned a castle in Ireland and a spa in Hertfordshire, not far from the De Havilland Mosquito plant.

  In 1974, in a London bar, Chapman bumped into Leo Kreusch, the toothless German prizefighter who had taught him to shoot at La Bretonnière. Leo told Chapman the real name of the man he had always known as Graumann, revealing that he had survived the war and that he was now living in Bremen. Chapman wrote von Gröning a letter, in which he recalled, with affection, the times they had spent together in Nantes, Paris, and Oslo. He inquired whether his old friend knew what had happened to the Norwegian sailing yawl purchased with his reward money, and whether he remembered Dagmar Lahlum. “I suppose she is married now,” he reflected nostalgically. Chapman described his properties, enclosing a photograph of the ancient Irish castle he had acquired, and invited von Gröning to come and stay: “What delightful memories we could exchange…I remember how much you used to like castles.”

  This was not, perhaps, the most tactful approach, but Eddie could not know that von Gröning was no longer wealthy.

  Suzanne Chapman was married in 1979 at Shenley Lodge, the thirty-two-room health spa owned by Eddie and Betty. Among the wedding guests that day was an elderly, shortsighted German gentleman who amused the children by reciting old-fashioned English nursery rhymes. When the party wound down, Eddie Chapman and Stephan von Gröning29 linked arms and wandered off together, deep in reminiscence. Betty was surprised and moved by the enduring bond between the spy and his spymaster: “They were like brothers.”30 As the last wedding guests departed, laughter and singing could be heard drifting from the garden: the faint strains of “Lili Marlene.”

  Footnotes

  *1See appendix.

  *2See National Archives, File KV2/459. Document 254 B, paragraph 50.

  Epilogue

  A FEW WEEKS after the publication of Agent Zigzag in Britain, I received a telephone call from the German ambassador to London, Wolfgang Ischinger. “I have just finished your book,” he said. “You describe how Eddie Chapman was flown across the Channel by the Luftwaffe and then parachuted into Britain. I thought you might be interested to know that the man who commanded that flight was my father. Both he and the pilot, Fritz Schlichting, are still very much alive.”

  Schlichting had been the tall, shy pilot with the iron cross at the controls of the Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane in 1942, while Karl “Charlie” Ischinger was his commanding officer and navigator, described by Chapman as a “small, thickset young man of about 28, with steady blue eyes.” Chapman himself had believed these men were dead: “The whole crew had been shot down and killed over England on their sixtieth sortie,” he wrote.

  The discovery that the pilot and navigator had not only outlived the war but survived still led to a meeting with Fritz Schlichting at his home in Detmold, Germany. At the age of eighty-four, charming and hospitable, the former pilot recalled that day as if he had stepped off the runway at Le Bourget last week, rather than a lifetime ago.

  “We were the Luftwaffe Reconnaissance Squadron number 123 stationed in the Château du Buc, outside Versailles. We flew night flights over Brita
in, photographing the effects of bombing raids and helping to identify targets. It was dangerous work. I lost more than eighty comrades. The average number of flights before being shot down was about forty. I flew eighty-seven in all.

  “One day my commanding officer, Major Gobin, told Charlie [Ischinger] and me that we had been chosen for a special mission. He told us to dress in civilian clothing and go to Paris. We met the English spy and his handlers in a restaurant for dinner; we knew him only as “Fritz,” like me. Much later, I discovered his real name. He was delightful, excellent company. We all got on famously.

  “We all met a few weeks later at Le Bourget airfield, and I showed him the plane. Chapman seemed quite calm, although he asked lots of questions. On the way over the Channel, we sang songs. There was a bad moment when Chapman was preparing to jump, and we realized that his parachute cord was not properly tied. If he had jumped like that, he would have fallen to his death. Charlie gave the signal, and Chapman opened the hatch. He had this huge pack on his back—heaven knows what was in it—and as he jumped it got wedged in the hole. He was struggling, but it wouldn’t budge, so Charlie got out of his seat and gave him a big boot in the back.

  “That was the last we saw of Chapman for about four months, but we heard that his mission had been successful. Everyone was very pleased with him. It never occurred to anyone that he might be working for the British. We met up with him again in Paris. It was a great reunion. Chapman handed Charlie and me two packages, containing a big box of chocolates and a pound of coffee that he had bought in Madrid on his way back. It was real coffee beans, not the fake stuff, so we were delighted.

  “After the Chapman mission, as a reward, we were each presented with a special engraved silver goblet. I have always treasured it. Charlie is still my best friend. He is ninety-seven now, and his health is not good, but we still have get-togethers when we remember the extraordinary night we dropped the English spy into Britain.”

  The courtly Luftwaffe pilot is only one of several people to emerge from Chapman’s past, adding fresh myths and memories, some affectionate, and some decidedly less so. An elderly, rather refined female voice came on the telephone at the Times, and without giving her name declared angrily: “He was an absolute shit, you know. The handsomest man I ever met. But a prize shit.” Then she hung up. In Norway, another of Chapman’s wronged women finally won recognition for her heroism. The Norwegian media picked up the Chapman story, and the national newspaper Aftenposten ran a front-page story with the headline “SHE DIED A GERMAN COLLABORATOR, BUT SHE WAS REALLY A BRITISH SPY.” It emerged that Dagmar had been brought before a war crimes tribunal after the war, imprisoned for six months, and agreed to acknowledge her own guilt in lieu of a formal conviction. Reviled and ostracized by her countrymen, Dagmar had kept her promise to Chapman, and never revealed her wartime links with the British secret service.

  John Williams, a friend of Chapman’s, recalled the first time they met, when Shenley Lodge was being run as a country club with a bar and roulette table before its more respectable incarnation as a health resort. “I arrived at the impressive front entrance of Shenley only to hear the most fearsome of noises from the roof of the mansion. It was on this roof I met Eddie strapped into a Vickers machine gun firing at a sheet draped between two oak trees half a mile away!” Another acquaintance, the journalist Peter Kinsley, wrote a letter to the Times after Agent Zigzag was serialized in it. “Eddie would have loved the publicity. His old friends said he should have worn a T-shirt emblazoned ‘I am a Spy for MI5.’ The last time I met him he described how he had missed a fortune in ermine (to be used in coronation robes) during a furs robbery, because he thought it was rabbit. He also said he successfully convinced a German au pair girl that he was a post office telephone engineer, and robbed the wall safe. He was also once visited by an income tax inspector, and produced a doctor’s certificate that he had a weak heart and could not be ‘caused stress.’ Ten minutes later, he drove, in a Rolls-Royce, past the inspector waiting in the rain at a bus stop, and gave him a little wave.”

  I also received a mournful letter from Brian Simpson, a collector of wartime medals who had lived near Shenley Lodge in the 1980s. Simpson had heard of Chapman’s adventures through a mutual friend, and asked if he could buy his Iron Cross. Sure enough, a few weeks later, Chapman duly produced the German medal; indeed, he produced two, saying that he had been given another one by Hitler himself. A deal was struck: Eddie Chapman took the money, and a delighted Simpson took the medals. Two decades later, on reading this book, the collector realized that he had been conned. Chapman, of course, had given his own Iron Cross to Ronnie Reed many years earlier. Those in Simpson’s possession were replicas. “Your book came as quite a shock,” wrote Simpson. “It now seems that Eddie had the last laugh. My wife was also offered a small jeweled dagger that Eddie said was given to him by Hermann Göring. She declined to take it.” Chapman, needless to say, had never laid eyes on Göring.

  One after another, Chapman’s former associates, ex-lovers, and victims emerged from the past to add their stories—some true, some the legacy of Chapman’s self-mythologizing. But then, to my astonishment, there reappeared the only person who really knew the truth about Eddie Chapman: Eddie Chapman himself.

  John Dixon, an independent filmmaker, called me to say that he had six hours of footage of Chapman talking about his life, not one second of which had ever been broadcast. Dixon had shot the film in 1996, the year before Chapman died, with a view to making a documentary. That never happened. But he had kept the film safe, thinking that one day Chapman’s story would be told. He now offered to show it to me.

  Sitting in a small screening room in Soho, meeting Chapman for the first time from beyond the grave, was one of the strangest experiences of my life. Chapman was old and already ill when the film was made, but still vital. He still exuded a feral charm, as he lounged in an armchair, reminiscing, smoking, chuckling, winking, and flirting with the camera. He described parachuting into Britain, his relationship with von Gröning, the faked bombing of the De Havilland aircraft, and his life in Jersey, France, Lisbon, and Oslo. His criminal exploits were recalled with airy pride.

  But there was a valedictory tone to his words: this was the last testament of a man talking to posterity, and setting the record straight—or, in some instances, bent. Because at the age of eighty-two, Chapman was still a shameless liar. In one passage, for example, he describes being taken to see Winston Churchill in 1943 and sharing a bottle of brandy with the prime minister while the latter sat in bed in his dressing gown. It is a splendid story. It is also completely untrue.

  Chapman could never have imagined that MI5 would decide to release its records, and that the truth about his wartime service would one day be revealed. His own death appears imminent in John Dixon’s footage, but there is Eddie Chapman still playing by his own rules: a grinning villain, spinning a yarn, looking you straight in the eye while he picks your pocket.

  BEN MACINTYRE

  March 2007

  APPENDIX

  This is an exact copy of the explanation of Chapman’s code, contained in the MI5 archives (KV2 455) held at the British National Archives in Kew, London.

  M U L T I P L I C A T I O N C O D E

  Given to

  An English Parachutist

  This code is based on the word: “CONSTANTINOPLE” which is agreed upon before the agent’s departure. Constantinople is then given its numerical position in the alphabet in the following manner and multiplied by the date on which the transmission takes place. In this case the 8th has been chosen.

  The next procedure:

  Write out the alphabet in full, giving each letter its numerical position.

  The result of the multiplication is then written out and the message to be transmitted—in this case:

  ‘I HAVE ARRIVED AND IN GOOD HEALTH’

  is written below.

  It will be noticed that the first five letters are ‘f’s. This is the agreed si
gn between the agent and his German Control that he is operating of his own free will. Should he be forced to transmit, the omission of the five ‘f’s would immediately disclose to the German Control that he had been apprehended.

  The Method of Coding:

  Add ‘f’ (which is the 6th letter) to the 2 above it, making 8, and selecting the 8th letter in the alphabet—‘h’—

  In the second instance ‘f’ again (the 6th letter in the alphabet), added to 3, making 9 which is—‘i’—

  This method is continued throughout the message including the signature ‘FRITZ’.

  The Groups of 5

  are then read off horizontally instead of vertically as in other cases.

  Thus:

  HILNO PHFYL YFZVQ VNFCR FLTOX VDMHH MYPBN RRVBB

  Note: It is always necessary to include the exact number of letters in the code before commencing the coded groups of five.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DOZENS OF PEOPLE IN FIVE countries have generously contributed to the writing of this book, with research help, interviews, advice, and access to photographs, documents, and memories. In Britain, I am indebted to Betty Chapman; Tony Faramus; Howard Davies; Hugh Alexander at the National Archives; Mary Teviot for her splendid genealogical sleuthing; Professor M. R. D. Foot and Calder Walton for their invaluable historical expertise; Major A. J. Edwards and the late Colonel Tony Williams at the Military Intelligence Museum archive; Caroline Lamb at the Liddell Hart Centre for military archives; Dunia Garcia-Ontiveros at the National Maritime Museum; George Malcolmson, Royal Navy Submarine Museum; and David Capus, Metropolitan Police Service Records Management Branch. Andrea and Edward Ryde, Sophia and Charles Kitson, Margery Barrie, Carolyn Elton, Nicholas Reed, and Charles Chilton all helped me to build up a more complete picture of the various case officers. In Jersey, I am grateful to Steven Guy-Gibbens, governor of HM Prison La Moye, and Paul Matthews, deputy judicial greffier, for granting me access to closed prison, police, and judicial records; to Linda Romeril and Stuart Nicolle at the Jersey Historical Archives; and Jan Hadley and John Guegan of the Jersey Evening Post. In Norway, Alf Magnussen of Aftenposten was supremely helpful in tracking down memories of Dagmar through Bibbi Røset, Leife Myhre, and Harald Næss (who kindly allowed me to destroy part of his roof with a crowbar in the search for Chapman’s concealed film). In the United States, Anne Cameron Berlin carried out useful preliminary research in the U.S. National Archives. In Germany, I am grateful to Peter Steinkamp for his work at the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg, and to Petra and Ingeborg von Gröning for their hospitality and help. I am also grateful to Georges and Caroline Paruit, the owners of La Bretonnière in Nantes.