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. 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. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

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. Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. 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 by ben macintyre