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. Then he and a friend discovered how to use gelignite, wrapped in condoms, to blow open the doors of safes, and by 1939 he had plenty of money. He was well known to the police, who picked him up in Jersey that summer; he was in prison there when the Germans arrived next year. Denounced (wrongly, for once) as a saboteur, he was packed off to a French internment camp at Romainville in the eastern suburbs of Paris, and was rescued by the Abwehr, the German armed forces’ secret service, for whom he had volunteered to work.
They spent over a year training him as a spy, and parachuted him back into Cam- bridgeshire late in 1942. He gave himself up immediately to the police, not knowing that they had been expecting him, provided a flood of intelligence about Abwehr personalities and methods and was taken on by the Double Cross committee as a double agent.
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