On an early dawn walk, I found this wet, dew-soaked book abandoned on the same lakeside park bench where I had found The Moscow Cipher over a year ago. But unlike The Moscow Cipher this one is a well researched, true spy story, and stranger than any novelist could ever dream up. Thomas: Harris’s Hannibal Returns is another book that I found deserted outdoors , although I can’t recall what park bench it was on. A friend whose whole career was as a counterintelligence agent around the world suggested that perhaps that park bench is a ‘drop’ for some local secret agent network. If so, I have interrupted their communications two or three times. More likely someone just likes to read spy stories in the fresh air. But who would leave any deserving book to the elements on a park bench? At least as far as I know, no one followed me home.
Eddie Chapman was a British bank robber, extortionist and philanderer, associating with the criminal gangs around Soho before WWII. After diving out the window of restaurant on Jersey Island where he was entertaining his latest lover to escape from the law officer who showed up, he was imprisoned by the Nazi occupiers. Taken to various mainland sites, he eventually volunteered to work with the Nazi Abwehr secret service. Between 1942 and late 1944, he was variously in England (parachuted in at night twice), occupied France, Quisling’s Norway, neutral Portugal, or at sea. He was trusted by his Nazi handlers and later by the British MI5 and MI6 spooks, providing radio information of apparently great strategic value to both sides. But much of the information was meant to deceive, and he was a master at deception. His handlers were obliged to arrange for prostitutes to satisfy his unbridled libido. He was paid by both those whom he betrayed and those he helped, but money was never a major motivation to him. Rather, he was one of those interesting totally amoral human beings who was also absolutely addicted to taking risks.
The world of double agents, espionage and counterespionage is laid bare in fascinating detail. It is enough to make any reader paranoid and suspicious of the real motives and activities of close friends and casual acquaintances alike. The moral dilemmas faced by wartime leaders, such as feeding the Germans false information about where their V-1 rockets were landing, which would result in an adjustment by them to aim at different population centres, are difficult to resolve.
After the war, when back in his British criminal element, Chapman attempted unsuccessfully to write a book about his role in the war. But like my espionage friend, he was prevented from doing so by the legal and political establishment. (There is no Statue of Limitation in the Official Secrets Act applicable to those holding state secrets) That was probably just as well, because Eddie Chapman, like some current politicians, seemed to be constitutionally unable or unwilling to distinguish truth from fiction.
The detailed Nazi radio codes provided in the Appendix, which I cannot decipher, are enough to make me wonder about why this book was left on a park bench. Perhaps my suspicions are unfounded.
Better than almost any spy or crime novel, this is a fascinating well researched and well written book.
The Passionate Reader 