One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit.At the heart of the deception was the 'Double Cross System. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War.ĭ-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms.

Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. His name was Eddie Chapman, but he would shortly become MI5's Agent Zigzag. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort. Sixty years after the end of the war, and ten years after Chapmans death, MI5 has now declassified all of Chapmans files, releasing more than 1,800 pages of top secret material and allowing the full story of Agent Zigzag to be told for the first time.One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. Both countries provided for the mother of his child and his mistress. In Britain, he was pardoned for his crimes, becoming the only wartime agent to be thus rewarded. The Nazis feted Chapman as a hero and awarded him the Iron Cross.

Crisscrossing Europe under different names, all the while weaving plans, spreading disinformation, and, miraculously, keeping his stories straight under intense interrogation, he even managed to gain some profit and seduce beautiful women along the way. For the next four years, Chapman worked as a double agent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service who at one time volunteered to assassinate Hitler for his countrymen. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty inside the villain was a hero.

He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer.

Agent zigzag and operation mincemeat