Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy
By Ben Macintyre
Benedict Macintyre was born on Christmas Day(hey same as Newton...sort of) in 1963 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, the United Kingdom. His father was Angus Donald Macintyre, a Fellow, and Tutor in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford. His mother Joanna, was the daughter of a baronet. So as you can imagine Mr. Macintyre grew up in a fairly academic and somewhat privileged environment, attending Abingdoh school, (which is the 20th oldest school in the U.K, celebrating its 765th anniversary in 2021) as a boy. He attended and graduated from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1985 with a degree in history. After that, he went to work as a columnist and Associate Editor for The Times, working in New York, Paris, and Washington D.C at various times. He published his first book in 1992 and has published over a dozen books since. Most of his books are biographical looking at the lives of spies, crooks, and wild adventurers who lived on the fringes of the “civilized” world. I suppose that might explain his interest in Eddie Chapman, who was in a sense all three. Agent ZigZag was published in 2007 by Harmony books, which is an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, which is owned by Random House (why no I haven't dropped this)(this is almost as complicated as tracking secret agents…). The book is the biography of Eddie Chapman, a man who rose from safecracker to arguably the most successful double agent in World War II, although I'll admit the competition for that title is fierce.
I suppose before I get too far into the book I should define my terms, on the chance that some of my readers don't know what a Double Agent is. A double agent is a spy that started off working for one country only to be turned by a second country and spies on their original employer (seems straightforward if somewhat risky as a job). Well, most of the time Double Agents are used to supply disinformation, false information meant to deceive their original employer. This is different from a defector, who is someone who switches sides and may or may not bring covert intelligence with them, as the double agent usually stays in place. This is also different from an asset, which is a person who provides information to a spy voluntarily but is usually not a trained spy(less straightforward and way riskier especially because most people are horrible liars). Of course, agents can end up being assets and assets can turn into agents because this is a complicated game where things change quickly. This is made more complicated by the fact that there are re-double agents, agents who get caught as double agents by their original employer and are forced to mislead the 2nd employer (wait hold on let me draw a diagram). There are also Triple Agents, who are spies who pretend to be double agents but never stopped working for their original employer. The difference between a triple agent and a re-doubled agent is that a re-doubled agent is forced and a triple agent isn't. As you can tell from this paragraph, espionage is a complicated game where lies can stack up quickly and loyalties are often in doubt (“Nobody can get the truth out of me because even I don't know what it is. I keep myself in a constant state of utter confusion”). Let's dive into the book itself, shall we?
The book gives us a quick overview of Eddie Chapman's life before the war. A boy born in poverty to a father who spent most of his time in a bottle, Eddie was smart but lazy. Before turning to crime Eddie tried a number of other things, he attempted a career in engineering but grew bored with it. He then enrolled in the British Army joining the Coldstream Guards. He did well in training but found standing guard boring (on the surface it doesn’t seem super exciting but you would know better than I would {It can get pretty boring but at least you usually aren’t being shot at}). On his first leave, he went into the bad neighborhood of Soho and upon meeting a pretty girl, deserted. This turned out to be a mistake as she turned him in once his pay dried up. He served time for desertion and was turned out with a dishonorable discharge and headed right back to Soho. There he started working as a barman, movie extra, masseur, boxer, wrestler, whatever work he could find to pay for his expensive taste for late champagne breakfasts and even later fast nights surrounded by crooks, artists, and various other types of people your Mother would be disappointed to find you hanging around with (I dunno she seems to think Marines and Communist are a good influence on me so who’s to say? {low blow, man, besides we were hanging with him long before he went commie}). This started a predictable slide into petty crime, check forging, theft, and the rather disgusting practice of seducing and blackmailing women (I was cool with the first one, not the other two). Frankly, Eddie seemed doomed to become petty scum, except for the introduction of gelignite into his life. Gelignite is an explosive gel created from nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose invented in 1875, it's incredibly stable, moldable, and can be handled with no safety gear as long as you keep it away from anything that can detonate it. To the British underworld, it was perfect for safe cracking, and when Eddie met James Hunt, a professional safecracker... Well, things got interesting. Eddie became more than a petty thug, the money from safe cracking gave him access to goods and people of a higher class and he worked to fit himself into them. Meeting people like Terrance Young, director of the first James Bond film, Eddie learned about wines, manners and began to read widely, making up for the lack of education in his early life (like a Dickens novel directed by Michael Bay). However the police were closing in and AFTER picking a girl named Betty, Eddie made for the island of Jersey, where after breaking into a nightclub he was caught and sentenced to 2 years of hard labor on the island after which he would be handed over to the English court system for further punishment (sounds like extradition but Jersey is a dependency of the UK, so I’m guessing separate charges? {Yes, Jersey has a separate court system from the rest of the UK}). It was 1939 and the greatest war in history was about to open its European front.
World War Two frankly changed the course of history in a lot of ways. It was the death of the European-dominated world economy and the rise of the world dominated by the US and the USSR. It changed the fate of millions of people, the vast majority of them for the worse. For many, this would include a terrible and early death. For some people, among them Eddie Chapman, however, it was an opportunity (as well as vast numbers of industrialists who built up massive corporations off government contracts, I’m looking at you Coke and Hersheys). By 1940 the island of Jersey was under German occupation and when Chapman was released from prison, he opened a barbershop with a friend named Faramus which was also a front for the black market. At this point he offered to join the Nazi spy program, a move he would later claim was driven by a desire to get to England so he could provide for his first daughter Diane but was instead arrested by the Gestapo for resisting the German occupation, ironically a crime he never committed. His friend Faramus was arrested with him and was later shipped off to a concentration camp, barely surviving the war. Eddie was first dropped in the prison of Romanville in France which was used to hold hostages that were shot in retaliation for actions by the French resistance. It was here that the Nazis took his offer seriously enough to offer him a job attracted by the fact that there was a man who spoke French, German and English, and had a list of criminal skills that they would use pre-learned. (I mean he practically already sounds a bit like a spy from just that stuff) The book spends a lot more time on this period of recruitment by the Nazis and his first period of training in occupied France. We get a full look at the people who trained him intending to parachute him into the English countryside to commit explosive mayhem and how Eddie dickered and argued to make sure he would be paid for his trouble. We get a look at Eddie's German boss an out at the heels German aristocrat named Von Groning, who may have been working to spike Nazi efforts. For example, we know Von Groning often refused to send prisoners to concentration camps and at times released them, believing it a lesser crime to release the guilty than to ship off the innocent. While I agree with Von Groning here, it also makes him really bad at being a Nazi, which isn't a criticism(no, no that is not a criticism). We also get a look at Eddie's somewhat delicate mental state, where he could slide from excited and committed one minute to depressed and nihilistic the next. Which leaves me wondering how much of Eddie's behavior before, during, and after the war came from unrecognized and untreated real psychological problems? (Always hard to tell well after the fact, could be a justifiable response to stress, could be a latent manifestation of some kind of fetal alcohol issues leading to poor impulse control, or maybe some type of bipolar/BPD issue. All of these things are common reasons for people to bounce between careers or engage in risk-taking behaviors {Well his father was a barely-there drunk and there’s nothing about his mother in the book and he grew up in poverty so who can say?})
Eddie was sent to England where, instead of carrying out his mission, he promptly surrendered to the British intelligence agency MI5 (see risk-taking behavior {wouldn’t carrying out the mission for the Nazis be riskier though? (Potentially, he is a known criminal and who’s to say the British would buy his story and not just lock him up to prevent any risk of him letting information slip)}). This is where he became part of one of the most successful intelligence operations ever run, the British Double Cross system run by MI5. This was greatly made possible by ULTRA, the operation that cracked the German Enigma code system. This meant for most of the war, the British had complete access to even the most secure communications of the German government and the Germans never realized it. Because of this, the British were able to find and arrest just about every German spy sent to the UK. Due to this, some 480 spies were arrested throughout the war, only 77 of them were native Germans, with the vast majority coming from all over western Europe. The ones they didn't arrest like Chapman gave themselves up. The book goes into fairly great detail on how the system worked in general, explaining how German agents were paired with guards and handlers and either taught their handlers to send messages over shortwave radios or sent messages while their handles watched and listened. Chapman managed to charm his handler and his guards to the point that they brought him his daughter and let the Mother of the child a dancer named Fredia live in the safe house with them! Even more importantly Chapman convinced MI5 to fake the success of his mission, sabotaging the factory that built the Mosquito bomber and send him back to Germany, where he became the only British citizen awarded the Iron Cross.
The last part of the book covers his time in Norway and his efforts to get the Germans to send him back to England and his fall from grace from a position as a spy once he returned to England. His fall from an active agent in a lot of ways is due to the failure of the British Intelligence Community and bluntly the flaws of the British Class System. Eddie was handed over to a new handler, an upper-class drunk who never saw action but had the job because of an influential Father In Law and the fact that he was “one of the right kind of people.” This new handler decided to drive Eddie out of the service because he was a liar, a thief, and someone who was militantly unfaithful to every woman he was ever with. Now all of this is true and at no point am I gonna say Eddie Chapman was a good person but those very qualities are what made him a good spy (generally speaking I’d say that being a good spy often means being a bad person) and bluntly he had rendered good service to England at the risk of his very life and that deserved better consideration. Another part is I frankly loathe people like the handler in question who are moralizing busybodies, whose own moral character is severely lacking and frankly degenerate but have the nerve to render judgment on others and act as some sort of moral enforcer. (The British did call a chunk of their counterintelligence service “the office of ungentlemanly warfare, so this is totally on track for them.) Eddie was at least honest about being in his own words, a villain. On top of that, I just hate seeing some desk-warming rear lines puke sneer at someone who puts themselves at the sharp end. I mean we are literally talking about spies here, not altar boys! People whose profession entails lying and stealing! (see good spy=generally not a good person) That said, Eddie's war experience propelled him to greater successes after the war and he died in his own castle, married to Betty the young lady he left in Jersey, while the man who busted him out of the service died broke and alone rambling in cheap bars(HA!). Now that was a castle that Eddie bought with ill-gotten gains because he had learned to become a better class of crook from everyone involved but if you ask me MI5 has only themselves to blame for this. I mean they never even arranged an official pardon for him. Which is the least they could have done.
Despite that, this is a really interesting book to read about a man who frankly was uplifted by the war, not dragged down by it. Did Eddie Chapman deserve to be uplifted? Probably not. Was Eddie a good person? No, absolutely not. But he did play a role in defeating the Nazi war machine and did so at personal risk and I don't think you can ask much more from him(I think that's one of the cheat codes for that generation, “I messed up Nazis so I get more leeway on xyz”). Especially since we can't really claim that British society showed him a lot of gratitude. This is something to think about since if Eddie had been shown some gratitude and understanding, there may have been a bare chance at making a semi-honest productive citizen out of him. If nothing else, having him teach his skills to the next generation of British spies could have been useful, instead of throwing him away. Especially with the Cold War dawning. Now this book does not get us into Eddie's head or even pretend to really try, instead of depending on the testimony of others and recovered documents throughout the book, which means while we can sympathize with Eddie we never forget that this guy is a liar, a crook and someone who will cheat on you with no twinge of conscious. For Mr. Macintyre to walk that fine line without lionizing Eddie or dragging him through the muck is a great feat of writing and he does so entertainingly and educationally. Letting the readers come to their own conclusions about Eddie's motives and moral character. I'm opening War World II month by giving Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy by Ben Macintyre an A and I encourage you to read it.
This book was selected by our ever-wise patrons, if you’d like a vote on what books get reviewed, what theme months are pursued, how they are pursued, and so on… Consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a dollar a month. Next week, also selected by our ever-wise patrons, we turn east as we examine how intelligence failures led to the greatest bloodbath in human history. Join us for Slaughter on the Eastern Front by Anthony Tucker-Jones. Until then, stay safe and keep reading!
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