Information About ™Eddie Chapman |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT EDDIE CHAPMAN | |
| 1914 births | |
| 1997 deaths | |
| double agents | |
| british spies | |
| german spies | |
| world war ii spies | |
| double cross system | |
| people from county durham | |
| recipients of the iron cross | |
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Eddie Chapman (1914 – 1997) was a British Double Agent (code named '''Zig-Zag''') during World War II . Chapman, was born in Burnopfield , County Durham , and was christened Edward Arnold Chapman. He deserted from the Coldstream Guards in the 1930s to become a safecracker with West End London gangs, a spent a number of stretches in jail for the crime. He had affairs with a number of women on the fringe of London high society and then blackmailed them with photographs taken by an accomplice. In one case he gave a young woman VD and blackmailed her by threatening to tell her parents that she had given it to him. He was arrested in Scotland and charged with blowing the safe of the headquarters of the Edinburgh Co-operative Society. But let out on bail, he fled to the Channel Island of Jersey where he continued his double career and was eventually imprisoned for fifteen years for cracking the safe of a large dance hall. He was in prison when the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans , who recruited him as an agent. He was trained in Germany and dispatched to the England to commit acts of Sabotage . On parachuting into Cambridgeshire , he immediately offered his services to MI5. Thanks to ULTRA , MI5 had prior knowledge of his mission. He was interrogated at Latchmere House in west London, known as Camp 020 . MI5 decided to use him against the Germans. They faked a sabotage attack on his target, the De Havilland aircraft factory in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, where they British built the Mosquito . He made his way back to Germany via Lisbon in Portugal . The Germans awarded him an Iron Cross (the first Englishman to receive such an award) and rewarded him with 110,000 Reichmarks and his own yacht. In an assessment an MI5 officer wrote "The Germans came to love Chapman, ... But although he went cynically through all the forms he did not reciprocate. Chapman loved himself, loved adventure and loved his country, probably in that order." Chapman was sent to Norway to teach at a German spy school in Oslo . But after Operation Overlord he was sent back to Britain to report back to Germany on the accuracy of the V-1 and V-2 weapons. He was used in a successful double cross where by consistently reporting that the bombs were falling short of their central London target, the bombs landed north of London doing far less damage than they otherwise would have done. After this he returned to Oslo with more false information. Eventually he was allowed to retire with a £6,000 payment from MI5, plus he was allowed to keep £1,000 of the money the Germans had given to him. He was granted a pardon for his pre-war activities and was reported by MI5 be living "in fashionable places in London always in the company of beautiful women of apparent culture" MI5 expressed some apprehension that when his money ran out he might take up crime again and if caught plead for leniency on grounds of his highly secret wartime service. In the end this did not happen thanks to his payment from the film of his war time exploits called Triple Cross (1967) in which he is was played by Christopher Plummer , with which Chapman set up a health farm. He died on 20 December , 1997 , aged 83, from undisclosed causes. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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