Agent Zigzag

Eddie Chapman is a charming criminal, a con man and a philanderer. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, he is parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless and a cyanide pill. His orders from the Abwehr are to blow up an airplane factory.

Instead he contacts MI5, the British Secret Service. For the next four years he works as a double agent, a lone British spy inside the German Secret Service. At one point he volunteers to assassinate Hitler. He crosses Europe under different names, makes plans, spreads disinformation and keeps his stories straight under intense interrogation. Along the way he turns a profit and seduces women.

The Nazis treat Chapman as a hero and award him the Iron Cross. Britain pardons his crimes, and he is the only wartime agent to receive that reward. Both countries also provide for the mother of his child and for his mistress. The question that troubles Chapman, his spymasters and his lovers is where one of his personas ends and the other begins.

This is narrative non-fiction built on MI5's declassified files on Chapman, more than 1,800 pages of top secret material released sixty years after the war and ten years after his death. It is the first time the full account can be told. The book looks at the psychology of espionage, and at how thin and shifting the line between loyalty and betrayal can be.