The British were aware of Germany's increasing hopes for Chapman through the broken Enigma codes. Macintyre, who came to the story while reading Chapman's obituary, never misses a delightful, haunting or terrifying detail. When the Abwehr's agent turned up, Chapman was in solitary, keeping warm by burying himself up to the neck in gravel. By the time his letter reached the right people, he had been carted off to Romainville in Paris, a concentration camp where death arrived with more regularity than food. From Jersey, Chapman offered his services to the Abwehr, the German secret service. 'Given adventure, he has the courage to achieve the unbelievable.' Indeed. 'Adventure to Chapman is the breath of life,' wrote 'Tin Eye' Stephens, one of his subsequent British handlers.
The local crime meant he was stuffing mattresses in a Jersey gaol when the Germans invaded in 1940.
That night he blew a safe to raise funds for his escape but was betrayed by a boarding-room landlady. He had to leave a woman (who wasn't his wife) by jumping through a hotel window and legging it along the beach. Revelling in a meeting between 'a highly trained scientist and an equally well trained burglar', he quotes Lord Rothschild, then the head of MI5's explosives and sabotage section: 'We were just saying that we two would rather like to do a little show together - blow something up.'Ĭhapman's early life of safe-cracking and cognac came to an end when he was caught on Jersey. Macintyre seems to have rustled through them with great happiness.
The author of books on Josiah Harlan, 'the man who would be king', and Adam Worth, 'the real Moriarty', Macintyre has an eye for the adventure tale revisited.Īlthough Chapman has long been recognised as one of Britain's most successful double agents, his full story has only recently been revealed with the opening of the files at the National Archive. Ben Macintyre tells Chapman's tale in a perfect pitch: with the Boys' Own thrills of Rider Haggard, the verve of George MacDonald Fraser and Carl Hiaasen's mordant humour.
0 kommentar(er)
