Master crook turned double agent

2:58pm Friday 8th February 2008

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JUST before midnight on Saturday, December 29, 1943, the people of Hatfield were startled from their slumbers by a large explosion.

As Sunday morning broke, they saw that the De Havilland factory, where thousands from Hatfield and St Albans laboured hard to produce aircraft crucial for the war against Germany, lay in ruins.

A saboteur had apparently struck a building housing electrical transformers, without which the vital factory would be out of action for months.

The scene was strewn with brick, rubble, distorted metal, concrete and wooden splinters, with the transformers in fragments.

However, all was not as it seemed, as revealed by Ben Macintyre's fascinating and gripping book, Agent Zigzag, recently published in paperback by Bloomsbury.The explosion and scene of devastation were in fact part of an elaborate ruse perpetrated by MI5, the British secret service.

Directed through the night by the famous professional magician Jasper Maskelyne, workmen had constructed the appearance of a destroyed factory from wood, papier-maché, netting and corrugated iron.

The purpose of this remarkable piece of theatre was to convince German air reconnaissance that their mission to cripple the factory, entrusted to a British traitor working for them, had been successful.

The "traitor" was Eddie Chapman, whose scarcely believable exploits are the subject of Macintyre's book.

But Chapman's breathtaking skill and daring as a double agent are only part of his fascination - these qualities served him equally well in his alternative career as a criminal.

Eddie Chapman, born in 1914 near Durham, was thrown out of the British Army at 18 for neglecting his duties.

With a taste for expensive living and a delight in thumbing his nose at authority, he soon fell into small-time theft, forgery and burglary.

His ill-gotten gains disappeared as quickly as they came on gambling, expensive drink and the women who found Chapman irresistible as he glided through 1930s Soho, where crooks, film stars, prostitutes, politicians and aristocrats rubbed shoulders.

He served a few short prison terms, but his crime escalated and by 1935 he was one of the Jelly Gang, whose gelagnite-powered safe-breaking promoted them into the Premier League of British crooks.

They stole thousands from top-class shops and hotels the length of Britain, but by early 1939 the police were hot on their heels.

The gang, accompanied by Chapman's current girlfriend Betty Farmer, a simple London girl who knew nothing of his life of crime, fled to Jersey.

But they were soon traced and, after a dramatic chase through the island, Chapman was caught by the Jersey police.

Given three years prison by the independent Jersey courts for crimes committed on the island, he was facing the prospect of a much longer sentence as soon as British justice caught up with him.

No doubt Chapman would have spent a substantial part of his life in prison had it not been for the German army, which occupied Jersey little more than a year after his capture.

Released by the occupation authorities, he was soon re-arrested by the Gestapo suspected of sabotage - the irony of suffering for something he hadn't done did not escape this prolific criminal.

His offer to work for the Nazis was at first treated with suspicion, but he persisted and was eventually transferred to a mansion in Loire valley taken over by the Abwehr, the German spy service.

Realising that his daring, cheek and plausibility would be ideal qualities for an undercover mission, they trained him in the arts of Morse code, invisible ink and sabotage.

Chapman made many genuine friendships in the Abwehr, and formed a particularly close relationship with his controller Stephan Von Groning, an aristocrat who secretly despised the Nazis.

His mission was to sabotage the De Havilland factory to stop production of Mosquitos, the innovative fighter-bombers wreaking havoc on the battlefield, and proving too hot for the Luftwaffe to handle.

So it was that Eddie Chapman, on the night of December 16, 1942, found himself dropping by parachute over Cambridgeshire into the country where the police were still desperate to get their hands on him.

At what stage in his spy training he had decided to betray his new friends is not clear, but as soon as he landed he went to the local police, and demanded to speak to MI5.

Unknown to him, they had been expecting the arrival of a British traitor on a sabotage mission as the famous Bletchley Park code-breakers had been reading German radio traffic.

But they could not be sure Chapman was not a triple agent, and it was only after months of interrogation they decided to trust him.

The deception at Hatfield, aided by false stories planted in national newspapers, was necessary to convince the Abwehr of their agent's reliability and loyalty.

It worked like a dream, Chapman soon receiving a delighted radio message of congratulations from Von Groning.

His credentials firmly established, Chapman was now prepared by the British for a return to occupied Europe.

Posing as a crew member, he travelled on a merchant ship to Lisbon in neutral Portugal in March 1943.

Contacting the Abwehr through the German embassy, the double agent was taking a reckless gamble on his ability to keep the enemy hoodwinked.

But although Von Groning was falling out of favour with the Nazis, Chapman was accepted as genuine throughout his lengthy de-brief in occupied Norway.

His new mission was to report back on the effectiveness of Germany's latest weapons, the V1 and V2 flying bombs, and it was in this role that Chapman proved his true value to the British.

In a series of radio messages after a second parachute drop into Cambridgeshire in June 1944, Chapman convinced the Germans that the deadly missiles were overshooting central London, while in fact they were falling short.

Consequently, the rockets were given less fuel, ensuring most fell safely in rural Kent.

Before the war's end, Chapman fell out with MI5, and soon relapsed into his life of crime.

He lived a comfortable life in peace-time England, eventually owning a health farm, where he lived with his wife Betty, the girl he had taken to Jersey in 1939.

That is where the story completes a remarkable full circle, for the health farm, where they lived until his death in 1997, was Shenley Lodge on the outskirts of St Albans.

Agent ZigZag by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury and is for sale at £7.99. For more details see www.bloomsbury.com