Thread by @Delta_ofVenus

Time for a Friday history thread! How about we do Eddie Chapman AKA Agent Zigzag, one of the greatest spies & double agents of the WWII era. Sort of a James Bond type, but also a way more interesting character study.

We'll start at the beginning. Eddie was born in 1914 Durham, son of a tavern/pub owner. The whole Chapman clan had a reputation for mischief & here Eddie held true. Smart kid, didn't take much to school, got into some trouble.

For some reason at 17 he decided to join the Coldstream Guards, & after almost a year of guarding the Tower of London, he (predictably in hindsight) went AWOL to run off w/a Soho girlfriend. A few months in prison & dishonorable discharge.

He went back to Soho & did some casual jobs - tending bar, movie extra, etc - but gradually drifted toward a career in petty theft, fraud, gambling, which all went to support his increasingly refined taste in clothes, liquor, women, etc.

But those types were a dime a dozen in 1930s London. Eddie was a special breed - intelligent, curious, charming, good facility w/languages, & the ability to make pretty much everyone feel at ease & engaged. More than one woman described him as "The best looking man I ever met".

He soon integrated into the London demimonde of nightclubs & gambling halls, rubbing shoulders with artists, playwrights, gangsters, professional bettors, athletes, sex workers, society darlings slumming it, alcoholic writers, etc. He became a well-known figure in this milieu.

But Eddie's increasingly expensive tastes required cash flow not covered by petty crime. So he & some associates formed a safecracking gang, known popularly as "The Jelly Gang" due to their use of the explosive gelignite.

With Eddie as one of the main safecrackers, they performed a number of audacious robberies all over Britain. Beyond explosives they used clever disguises & other subterfuge, which would serve Chapman well down the road. But... they got caught robbing an Edinburgh co-op store.

Eddie jumped bail & fled to Jersey in the Channel Islands, where he met & began wooing the lovely Betty Farmer, a local girl. She knew him as wealthy, dashing, handsome, & glamorous, albeit a bit vague about his specific occupation for some reason.

Betty's illusions were shattered when, during a night out at dinner, Eddie suddenly jumped from their table & dove through a (closed) glass window, then began running off thru the idyllic Jersey fields with two plainclothes policemen in hot pursuit.

He eluded capture for a while, but eventually got thrown in jail. However by this time WW2 had started, so PLOT TWIST – the Germans invaded & occupied Jersey. He served a bit more of his sentence but was eventually released.

In jail Chapman had made a close friend named Anthony Faramus, a former hairdresser. After release they teamed up for a thriving wartime black market operation. To get off the island, they wrote a letter to the Germans offering to turn traitor & become spies on the UK mainland.

This backfired however, bringing Nazi attention on themselves. The Germans decided they were likely British spies instead and so shipped them to the notorious
Fort de Romainville, a prison & transit camp near Paris where many lost their lives.

After a lengthy stay in harsh conditions there however, Chapman's letter was somehow winding its way thru the Abwehr's (German intelligence service) bureaucracy. He was indeed eventually selected as a spy! Off to a peaceful French villa for training.

Seems like a decent place to stop right now, but keep watching this space - adventure awaits!

Going to hold off the rest till Saturday for time zone purposes (i.e. it's after 1am in Britain). I really should have done this as a podcast or something.

Let's resume the tale, shall we?

At this bucolic rural estate Chapman joined a team of German espionage agents, all under the instruction of an older man he knew as Dr Graumann. In reality “Graumann” was Baron Stephan von Gröning, shiftless German aristocrat who found his calling as an Abwehr spymaster.

In private von Gröning was anti-Nazi/Hitler & fairly liberal. Notably heavy drinker in an alcohol-steeped environment. He first served as an ambiable mentor for Chapman, then evolved into a friend & even father figure.

There were some nasty types too. Like Walter Praetorius, a neurotic humorless Nazi who believed that English Folk Dancing was one of the keys to civilization. Eventually the Nazis made him an official folk dance instructor for troops in Europe.

The Germans recognized Eddie's skill w/explosives, ease of lying, language knowledge (English, French, German, a smattering of others), & augmented that w/more expertise in sabotage, wireless radio, surveillance, fighting/shooting, parachuting, etc.

He was treated like a star in training, coddled even at times. Fine food, women, drink at his fingertips, all laced w/the undercurrent of dread that comes w/being a foreign spy for one of the most brutal regimes in history.

However Chapman was seemingly immune to dread, so no problem there.

There were several near-death incidents during this training – explosions, faulty parachute (which earned Eddie a mouth half-full of gold teeth), etc.

They code-named him FRITZ or affectionately Fritzchen, “Little Fritz”. The Brits, who had pretty much cracked Germany's wireless codes by this point, kept intercepting radio messages about this super-agent Fritz who would be arriving soon to do god knows what.

His primary mission was to parachute into Britain & bomb the De Havilland airplane factory, which manufactured the fighter-bomber Mosquito, one of the most pesky UK aircraft of the war. Secondary mission was various surveillance and/or sabotage.

To ensure he didn't just stay in England, the Germans essentially held his good friend Faramus hostage in prison, w/implied threat he'd be killed if Chapman strayed.

So in December 1942 via a Focke-Wulf recon plane (I think a FW-189 but not sure) that evaded UK patrols, he was flown over England laden w/spy gear & parachuted into a field.

Muddy & bruised from a rough landing, this former Coldstream Guard, playboy, & safecracker found himself back in his country of origin in the middle of the night ready to do her harm on behalf of the Nazi regime.

Except instead... he immediately went to the local police & turned himself in to MI5 (British secret service), telling them everything he knew. And thus his career as a double agent began.

MI5 put him to work. 1st with misleading radio transmissions about all manner of UK information – economic, govt, troops, etc. Keeping a delicate balance between truth (ideally stuff the Germans already knew) & just the right amount of falsehood in the most impactful places.

But the best part is the De Havilland plane factory, which produced the versatile Mosquito. An ingenious all-wood design, they could be produced cheaply & w/a larger labor force than conventional designs. Despicable but quotable Luftwaffe head Herman Goring said this abt them:

Suffice to say, they really wanted the main De Havilland factory knocked out of commission, IIRC the plan was to blow up the main transformer station. FRITZ probably did have the skills to do it, had he not joined up with the British.

So MI5, employing an army of special fx & design gurus, created a false (all noise & smoke, no shockwave) explosion & bomb damage that appeared to German recon flights that much of the factory had been blown to smithereens. Then planted fake-terse rumors about it for the media.

In reality, the site was cleaned up a few hours after the subterfuge, operations continued as normal.

Back in German territory, this was greeted with (stolen French) champagne – they bought the ruse. FRITZ's mission was a complete success!

Thru this, Chapman's MI5 spymasters didn't know what to make of him. Untrustworthy, criminal, mercurial, yet loyal to his country. Mostly self-educated w/a brilliance for improvisation & interaction. His singular driving force seemed to be a longing for danger w/o a safety net.

At one point he proposed conducting a suicide mission to blow up Hitler during a Berlin rally (which he had requested Groning allow him to attend if his mission was successful). MI5 vetoed this however.

His UK handlers & colleagues had a genuine affection for him - it was apparently hard not to despite his very real flaws - in their diaries & correspondence are constantly wondering if it'd be possible to keep him on the straight & narrow after the war.

He then volunteered to return to Occupied France & rejoin his old team to spy on them, using his new superstar spy status to get better access.

This would be by way of a convoy to neutral Lisbon (which was one of the main hotbeds of espionage activity during WW2). He posed as a ne'er-do-well sailor on a merchant ship (The City of Lancaster), only the captain knew his secret.

There was an air attack on the convoy sinking 9 ships, but the CoL made it thru. All the while he became a minor celebrity on the ship, a poetry-composing loose cannon & a horrible sailor.

Later the MI5 marveled at how much the sailors apparently loved his terrible poetry.

There are a bunch of sub-plots in Lisbon - involving picking a fight w/the biggest asshole on the boat & then jumping ship, his German safehouse being out of commission, dealing w/string of sketchy spies, meeting a beautiful Portuguese prostitute, etc.

When he finally met w/German intelligence, he had them manufacture these James Bond-esque bombs embedded in fake lumps of coal to blow up the ship. MI5 intercepted the radio msgs on this & said "Oh fuck, he betrayed us after all".

But while they desperately scrambled to intercept & possibly liquidate him before he killed everyone, Chapman gave the bombs to the captain to take back to the UK & study the design. It was common for him to freelance like this.

He was then taken back to Occupied France & underwent weeks of Nazi interrogation designed to break him into the "truth", using an elaborate cover story designed by him & MI5. Somehow he never wavered.

Unbeknownst to Eddie, about half the intelligence service believed him & the other half wanted him executed. The latter nearly got their way but he was eventually deemed truthful, which cemented his celebrity status.

He was then re-united with his old friend & mentor Von Gröning, whom he still loved like a father despite being a traitorous double agent now working against him.

It's thought that Von Gröning may have suspected he was a double agent. But by this point their fates were too entwined, and again Von Gröning was anti-Nazi anyhow.

Chapman was wined & dined like never before, & got a lot of firsthand knowledge on the inner workings of the German intelligence services. He was eventually sent to Occupied Norway to train other sabotage agents.

Unknown to him, his friend/hostage Anthony Faramus had been grabbed up in the Nazi extermination machinery & sent to a concentration camp a while ago. Although his story isn't over yet.

Aaaand... the story ain't over & I hate to do this - but for the rest you should read this book: amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-S…

FWIW I have listened to part of the Audible version too, it's also excellent.

There are so many subplots, personas, ironies, & comedy I've left out even in the story thus far. Easily enough material for at least 3 seasons on HBO or Netflix. It's already written itself w/zero changes needed. Someone needs to make this happen.

There are even some "What happened to so-and-so afterward?" epilogues that are tailor made for drama. And all the while the character study of Chapman - he always eludes snap judgements and/or introduces a twist you didn't expect. I guess that was his genius.

Oh, and there's sex & multiple love stories too, complete with twists. Chapman wasn't really built for monogamy nor did his career really foster it, but he had a heart & maybe even some sort of strange code (that no one could figure out).

Halfway thru this thread, part of me was like - the book is amazing & at least some people reading this will be better off w/o even more spoilers. I would have finished it otherwise. Even if you don't do nonfiction, it reads like a novel.