Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife

184 Pages·2013·2.02 MB·English

by  Betty Chapman

To Lilian Verner-Bonds, who encouraged the writing of this book.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the Chapman family, and especially to Betty’s daughter, for
the use of documents, tapes, photographs and other materials relating
to the life of this extraordinary woman. Thanks also to The History
Press, and especially to Mark Beynon, and to Nigel West for his
foreword.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Prologue: Agent Zigzag
1. Eddie is dead, long live Eddie
2. Spitfires, sabotage and serial killers
3. Round and round she goes
4. Beauty and the sea
5. Ghana
6. Kwame Nkrumah, I presume
7. A colourful bunch of villains
8. Double Cross on Triple Cross
9. Shenley
10. My home is my (Irish) castle
11. A healthy business
12. Eddie’s last battle
13. Reflections
Notes
Plate Section
Copyright
FOREWORD
BY NIGEL WEST
E
arly in March 1980 I found myself in Claygate, south-west London,
in the company of an elderly British army officer, Major Michael
Ryde, who had fallen on hard times. I was meeting him because I had
heard that during the war he had served in MI5 as a Regional Security
Liaison Officer, the post held by the organisation’s representatives
who acted as an intermediary between the counter-espionage branch,
designated B Division, and individual military district commanders.
Over a cup of coffee served by his long-suffering partner, Marjorie
Caton-Jones, Ryde recalled his recruitment into the Security Service
and happier times, when he routinely had been engaged in the most
secret work, much of it involved in the handling of double agents. As
he gained enthusiasm for his subject, and his improving memory
allowed him to add the kind of detail that ensures authenticity, these
revelations visibly moved Marjorie who confided to me later that in
all the years she had lived with the veteran, he had never mentioned
his wartime intelligence role. As a professional journalist of long
standing, having worked on The Sunday Telegraph for years, she had
developed a skill for listening, and on this occasion she sat rapt as the
man she had known and lived with described a part of his life that
hitherto had been entirely unknown to her. Later, she would reproach
herself for having failed to apply her inquiring mind to the one man
who had played such an important part in her recent life.
Major Ryde’s story largely revolved around his relationship with a
Nazi spy, code named Fritzchen, who had been expected to parachute
into East Anglia towards the end of December 1942. Much was
already known about him at MI5’s headquarters in St James’s Street,
information that had been gleaned from ISK and ISOS, the
cryptographic source based on intercepts of the Abwehr’s internal
communications. The German training school in Nantes, where
Fritzchen had been based, was connected to Berlin by a radio link as
the occupiers learned to distrust the French landline telephone system.
With regional operations supervised in every detail from the Abwehr’s
main building on the Tirpitzufer, the airwaves were entrusted with the
most banal details of the progress made by agents undergoing
preparation for missions in enemy territory. Fritzchen was known to
be a British renegade, paid a regular monthly salary of 450
Reichsmarks, with an agreed bonus of 100,000 Reichsmarks, then
valued at £15,000, if he pulled off his sabotage assignment
successfully. As well as mentioning his contractual arrangements, the
intercepts listed the two aliases he would adopt in England, the
frequencies of his wireless transmitter and the detail of his dental
repairs.
In Fritzchen’s case, his planned departure was delayed by a training
accident when he had been injured while practising a parachute drop.
After several false alarms, Ryde had been alerted to the imminent
arrival of the much-anticipated spy on a clandestine Luftwaffe flight
from Le Bourget in mid-December, and he finally landed near Ely on
the night of 20 December, three days late. Ryde had been waiting
patiently for this news, but he could not be certain of the exact
location of the drop-zone, nor the likely attitude of the spy. Worst
case, Fritzchen, who was known to have a criminal past, would prove
to be intransigent and uncooperative, making MI5’s task more
complicated. On the other hand, he might be wholly willing to
collaborate, and then there was always the middle path, of the spy
conditioned to self-preservation, who would take on whatever guise
that would save him from the gallows.
Ryde recalled the moment, in Littleport’s tiny police station, that the
Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire had ushered him into the
interview room where he was confronted with Fritzchen, the first Nazi
spy of his acquaintance, and who was equipped with £1,000 in notes,
a loaded automatic and a suicide pill. This would be the beginning of
an extraordinary adventure that would end in January 1946 when MI5
learned that the double agent known to them as Zigzag intended to
disclose his remarkable story in the French newspaper L’Etoile du
Soir. The result was a criminal prosecution at the Old Bailey on
charges under the Official Secrets Act in an attempt to remind Zigzag,
and other double agents also tempted to recount their experiences.
MI5’s leading lawyer, Edward Cussen KC, discussed the options at
length with his Director of B Division, Guy Liddell, who confided to
the diary he dictated every evening that authority had been given for
Cussen to travel to Paris to investigate what was regarded as a
significant breach of faith.
Cussen returned to London with the evidence required to arrest
Zigzag, and it was intended that a private session in a magistrate’s
court, held in camera, with a stern lecture from the bench, would act
as a deterrent, not just for Zigzag, but for any others interested in
publishing indiscreet memoirs. However, MI5’s intentions were
thwarted when, to the surprise of the prosecuting counsel, the defence
had called Major Michael Ryde, who had testified on oath at his trial
at Bow Street Court on 19 March, without any approval from MI5,
that the defendant was ‘the bravest man he had ever met’ and that, far
from deserving to be in the dock, he should receive a medal. Thus
ended Ryde’s career in the Security Service, and gave Eddie Chapman
the confidence to tell his truly incredible tale.
Thanks to Michael Ryde, and an introduction provided by him, I
was soon sharing coffee with Eddie Chapman and his equally
extraordinary wife, Betty, at their apartment in the Barbican. Always
modest about his own exploits, the legendary double agent regarded
his encounters with MI5 as only a small part of an extraordinary
career. Fortunately, Betty knew better!