Eddie Chapman, Agent Zigzag: Jelly Gang Safecracker With a Nazi Iron Cross

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Eddie Chapman was born in County Durham in 1914, joined the Coldstream Guards at 17, and deserted after nine months, earning 84 days in military prison. In London's West End he became a safecracker with the Jelly Gang, blowing safes with gelignite, once posing as a water board worker on Edgware Road. Fleeing a Scottish charge, he was arrested in Jersey in 1938 after diving through a closed hotel window and leaving his lover Betty Farmer at the table. He was still in a Jersey cell when Germany occupied the Channel Islands in June 1940, and he offered his services to the invaders. The Abwehr trained him near Nantes under Captain Stephan von Gröning.

In December 1942 he parachuted into Cambridgeshire to sabotage the de Havilland factory that built the Mosquito, and walked into a police station to offer himself to the British. MI5 faked the factory's destruction in January 1943 with painted canvas and rubble. Sent back through Lisbon as "Hugh Anson", he handed German coal bombs to his ship's captain, then was feted in Oslo with a yacht, cash and an Iron Cross. In 1944 he fed the Germans false V-1 impact reports that shifted bombs away from central London. MI5 dropped him in November 1944.

He got stuck in the bomber's exit hatch, which threw him miles off his drop zone.
His British handler at Camp 020, Latchmere House, was former BBC engineer Ronnie Reed.
MI5 judged that he loved himself, adventure and his country, in that order.
His Norwegian fiancée Dagmar Lahlum, a resistance member, served six months for treason because her work with him was never documented.
Von Gröning, his former Abwehr handler, attended the wedding of Chapman's daughter.

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