Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

War is too messy to produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of perfectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in between. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, pointing to the right path.

Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.)

Well you stick the dynamite in the keyhole and you don't damage the safe, only sometimes you put a little too much in and blow the safe door up, but other times you're lucky and the safe just comes open. Thus the scion of a great banking dynasty learned how to rob a bank.

Constructed almost entirely of wood, with a two-man crew and no defensive guns, the little plane could carry four thousand pounds of bombs to Berlin. With two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and a top speed of four hundred miles per hour, it could usually outrun enemy fighters. The Mosquito, nicknamed “the Wooden Wonder,” could be assembled, cheaply, by cabinetmakers and carpenters.

One night, the Carlton Club was hit by a bomb. The members of the surrounding clubs, in pajamas and slippers, formed long lines to save the library from the flames, passing books from hand to hand and discussing the merits of each as they passed. Such

MI5 was careful to destroy the traffic, aware of the potential repercussions if the inhabitants of southern London realized they were being sacrificed to protect the center of the city.

Quisling, vague, inefficient, and fanatical, won the rare distinction of being so closely associated with a single characteristic—treachery—that a noun was created in his name. At

ALL WARS—BUT this war in particular—tend to be seen in monochrome: good and evil, winner and loser, champion and coward, loyalist and traitor. For most people, the reality of war is not like that, but rather a monotonous gray of discomforts and compromises, with occasional flashes of violent color. War is too messy to produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of perfectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in between. Away

In a word, adventure to Chapman is the breath of life. Given adventure he has the courage to achieve the unbelievable.

Clearly, their application had been rejected, or merely ignored, on the longstanding principle that anyone who applies to join an espionage service should be rejected.

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.

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.

Some 480 suspected enemy spies were detained in Britain in the course of the war. Just 77 of these were German. The rest were, in descending order of magnitude, Belgian, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, and then just about every conceivable race and nationality, including several who were stateless. After 1940, very few were British. Of the total intercepted, around a quarter were subsequently used as double agents, of whom perhaps 40 made a significant contribution.

Praetorius was delighted with his new appointment, although his new position was not one normally associated with the fearsome Nazi war machine, let alone the Teutonic heroes of old. Praetorius had long been convinced of the therapeutic physical and cultural effects of English folk dancing. Somehow he had persuaded the German authorities of this and was duly appointed dance instructor to the Wehrmacht.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ROBIN “Tin Eye” Stephens, the commander of Camp 020, Britain’s secret interrogation center for captured enemy spies, had a very specialized skill: He broke people. He crushed them, psychologically, into very small pieces and then, if he thought it worthwhile, he would put them back together again. He

As “a spur to rumor-spreading,”32 the crew was solemnly sworn to secrecy.

As a mark of opposition, many wore paper clips in their lapels. The paper clip was a Norwegian invention; the little twist of metal became a symbol of unity, a society binding together against oppression.

The De Havilland Mosquito—or Anopheles de Havillandus, as military wags liked to call it—had proved a lethal nuisance to the Nazis ever since it went into production in 1940. Indeed, its effect on the German High Command was positively malarial. Designed

retribution [sic] for the wrongs I have committed.