- Macintyre, Ben.
Agent Zigzag.
New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-307-35341-2.
-
I'm not sure I'd agree with the cover blurb by the Boston Globe
reviewer who deemed this “The best book ever written”, but it's
a heck of a great read and will keep you enthralled from start to finish.
Imagine the best wartime espionage novel you've ever read, stir in exploits
from a criminal caper yarn, leaven with an assortment of delightfully
eccentric characters, and then make the whole thing totally
factual, exhaustively documented from archives declassified
decades later by
MI5,
and you have this compelling story.
The protagonist,
Eddie Chapman was,
over his long and convoluted career, a British soldier; deserter; safecracker;
elite criminal; prisoner of His Majesty, the government of the Isle
of Jersey, and the Nazi occupation in Paris; volunteer spy and saboteur
for the German
Abwehr;
parachute spy in Britain; double agent for MI5; instructor at a school for
German spies in Norway; spy once again in Britain, deceiving the Germans
about V-1 impact locations; participant in fixed dog track races; serial
womaniser married to the same woman for fifty years; and for a while an
“honorary crime correspondent” to the
Sunday Telegraph. That's a lot to fit into even a life
as long as Chapman's, and a decade after his death, those who
remember him still aren't sure where his ultimate allegiance lay or
even if the concept applied to him. If you simply look at him as an utterly
amoral person who managed to always come up standing, even after intensive
interrogations by MI5, the Abwehr, Gestapo, and SS, you miss his
engaging charm, whether genuine or feigned, which engendered deeply-felt
and long-lasting affection among his associates, both British and Nazi,
criminal and police, all of whom describe him as a unique character.
Information on Chapman's exploits has been leaking out ever since he
started publishing autobiographical information in 1953. Dodging the
Official Secrets Act, in 1966 he published a more detailed account of
his adventures, which was made into a
very bad movie starring
Christopher Plummer as Eddie Chapman. Since much of this information
came from Chapman, it's not surprising that a substantial part of it
was bogus. It is only with the release of the MI5 records, and through
interviews with surviving participants in Chapman's exploits that the
author was able to piece together an account which, while leaving many
questions of motivation uncertain, at least pins down the facts and
chronology.
This is a thoroughly delightful story of a totally ambiguous
character: awarded the Iron Cross for his services to the Nazi
Reich, having mistresses simultaneously supported in Britain
and Norway by MI5 and the Abwehr, covertly pardoned for his high-profile
criminal record for his service to the Crown, and unreconstructed
rogue in his long life after the war. If published as spy fiction,
this would be considered implausible in the extreme; the fact that
it really happened makes this one of the most remarkable
wartime stories I've read and an encounter with a character few
novelists could invent.
November 2008 