Title: Agent Zigzag
Rating: 3 Stars
This is the story of Eddie Chapman, an unlikely English spy during World War II.
Chapman joined the army, got bored, and went AWOL. He was caught, sentenced to military prison, and was given a dishonorable discharge. Later working as a bartender, he fell into a life of crime. He became a safe cracker for a gang of thieves. Arrested in Scotland, he was let out on bail and he fled to the island of Jersey. There, he barely escaped from detectives that were in hot pursuit. Later that night, he committed a burglary for which he was caught. He was sentenced to serve two years. It looked like a life of crime was going to be his future.
But then fate intervened. Jersey is one of the Channel Islands. The Nazis invaded it and occupied it as a prelude to a possible invasion of England. Chapman was still in prison on the island. He was transferred to a horrible Nazi prison in occupied France. He volunteered to spy on behalf of the Nazis.
Freed from prison, he underwent significant training with Abwehr, the German intelligence organization. After completing his training, he was parachuted into England to start his spying / saboteur career for the Nazis. Instead he promptly surrendered to British authorities. Unsure what to do with him, he was interrogated by the internal security service MI5 for several days.
Convinced that he was sincere, MI5 decided to use him as a double agent. They wanted to send him back to the continent to gather intelligence on their behalf. He made radio contact with the Nazis. To make it seem more authentic, MI5 faked an explosion at an airplane manufacturing plant to make it seem as if he fulfilled his primary mission.
Chapman then reinserted himself back into France. Greeted as a hero, he was awarded an Iron Cross. Now trusted even more, he was able to gain even more intelligence. He convinced the Nazis that he would be more valuable gathering intelligence back in England. He was then flown back and he parachuted back again into England.
There he was a fount of knowledge about German intelligence. This was during the time of the V-1 bombs. Communicating via a wireless supplied by the Nazis, he was able to feed false information to them regarding where the bombs were actually landing to trick them into changing the bombing trajectory to less populated or valuable areas.
By the end of the war, some people in MI5 had become tired of Chapman’s rapscallion ways. Ultimately, he was abruptly cashiered from the service.
While never quite reverting completely back to a life in crime, it’s fair to say that he didn’t exactly live on the straight and narrow. There were several times that he got in scrapes that MI5 quietly squashed to keep him happy and quiet.
In his later years, aware of his somewhat checkered life, he claimed to at least be ‘an honest villain’.
So that’s Eddie Chapman’s story. How was the book?
It was kind of a meh. The story was interesting. Chapman is, on the one hand, an interesting character. How could someone that was living on the fringes of society end up risking his life multiple times in the service of his country? What impelled him? Macintyre theorizes that Chapman had a nearly insatiable desire to lead an interesting, exciting, and dangerous life. That led him to his life of crime. Being a double agent during a world war would seem to be the ultimate expression of such a life.
On the other hand, he really is kind of an asshole. In England he had a woman that bore his child that he planned to marry. He convinced MI5 to supply a monthly fund to provide for her. Later in Norway, he met another woman that he planned to marry. Even worse, in Norway everyone thought he was a Nazi, so the woman was scorned by her fellow Norwegians for being a corroborator. He convinced the Abwehr to provide her a monthly stipend. Once the war was over, he ignored both of those women and ended up marrying a woman that he met on Jersey. They stay married even though apparently he was an inveterate philanderer.
During the war, the person that he was closest to was probably the Nazi that was head of his section in France. Even so, this was the person that he used and betrayed the most. Relationships to Chapman seem to have mostly a transactional element to them. He is not a person that I would trust with anything that I hold valuable.
The three star rating is for a couple of reasons. First of all, I actually didn’t find his story really all that engaging. He had a few moments of derring do, but there seemed to be a lot of sitting around, drinking, and womanizing. That part just wasn’t that engaging to me.
More importantly, Macintyre seemed to be enchanted with Chapman. Even though Chapman was clearly a morally dubious person, the book had a boys will be boys attitude in excusing him.
This might just be a facet of Macintyre’s writing. I’ve also read Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends, and The Spy and the Traitor. In all of these works, the protagonists were consistently presented with a roguish charm. Macintyre seems to be in thrall to those that ply the spycraft trade. I find such overt partiality while reading a history, even one that is a mass market narrative, to be a bit off key.
dorkenstein 