The formidable Colonel ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, who ran MI5’s inmost interrogation centre, once recorded that ‘fiction has not, and probably never will, produce an espionage story to rival in fascination and improbability the true story of Edward Chapman, whom only war could invest with virtue, and that only for its duration’. If Ben Macintyre had presented this story as a novel, it would have been denounced as far too unlikely; yet every word of it is true. Moreover he has that enviable gift, the inability to write a dull sentence. An enthralling book results from the opening up of once deadly secret files.
Chapman was a professional burglar, who thought himself right at the top of the criminal tree. He was born in a slum village in Co. Durham in 1914, the son of a drunken publican, joined and deserted from the Coldstream Guards and became a barman in Soho.
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