Portrait of a Hero

Eddie Chapman is a gay dog. International society intellectuals like Director John Huston admire his mind, and blondes his wire-and-whipcord body. He can keep a pub in fits of laughter or a softly lit drawing room at hushed attention. He is Mayfair's favorite criminal ("I'd like you to meet Eddie Chapman, my smuggler friend. Tell us about the jobs you've pulled lately, Eddie"). And low society in Britain pays him homage, for in his time, Eddie was the prince of safecrackers. After the war, it became apparent to all his acquaintances that Eddie had also been one of the coolest of World War II's coolheaded spies. Big question was: For which side?

A poor man's son, born in England's industrial north, Eddie Chapman enlisted in the Coldstream Guards and was discharged (for overstaying his leave in a brunette's apartment) before he was 19. Two years later he was famous as the leader of the Gelignite Gang, which specialized in blowing safes. "Eddie gets nervous at the thought of anything locked up," said friends proudly. He drove a low-slung car, had a West End flat stocked with a succession of girls, and was well known in Soho's nightclubs. Caught on a routine job one night in Edinburgh, Eddie was released on bail, promptly went to London and scooped up enough cash to bail out his two friends. With Eddie's girl, they lit out for the Isle of Jersey. There the police caught up with him. Eddie spent the next three years in Jersey's jail.

Cognac & Code. During the war, the Germans took over Jersey. The day Eddie was released, he marched into the office of the German commandant and boldly asked to join the German secret service. He hated England, he explained, and produced clippings of his cases to show that he would be jailed for countless years if the British police ever caught up with him. The Germans whisked Eddie off, first to a prison near Paris (where Eddie beguiled his time by sawing through the doors which led to the women's quarters), then to a chateau on the Loire. Soon Eddie was happily drinking wine and cognac with the bibulous major in charge.

Between drinks he was drilled in secret codes, in how to make explosives out of homemade materials, how to make a time bomb out of a wristwatch, how to blow up ships (drill a hole in a chunk of coal, fill with explosive, drop coal in bunker. When fed to boilers, the explosion bursts the boilers). When Eddie was judged ready, the Germans strapped -L-2,000 on his back, fitted him out with an English-made suit, shoes, detonators, wireless set, and an identity card salvaged from the dead of Dieppe. His mission: to blow up the De Havilland factory making Mosquito bombers. Von Rundstedt himself wished him godspeed.

Eddie was dropped by parachute, made his way on a commuters' train to London, and holed up in a suburban boardinghouse. With his wireless set he established contact with his German masters. But he also made a call from a pay telephone to a British official. Eddie explained that he had been parachuted in by the Germans, and described his mission, but said he wanted to work for England. Brashly, he named his price--a full pardon for all his safecrackings, and permission to keep the -L-2,000 the Germans had supplied him with. The British accepted his terms.

In return, Eddie turned over all the messages from his German contacts, transmitted answers (on bomb damage, location of government offices, etc.) composed by British intelligence. For his major mission, the British undertook a gigantic hoax: they camouflaged the De Havilland works to look as if they had been blown up from the inside, took air photographs to check telltale flaws. When all was ready, Eddie radioed that his mission had been completed. A German reconnaissance plane circled the plant. Then Eddie was told by wireless to return to Germany via Lisbon.

Misinformation. Eddie went--without knowing whether the hoax had fooled the Germans. That took courage, and Eddie had it. But the hoax worked. In Germany he was hailed as a hero. His chief decorated him with the Iron Cross itself.

For a year, Eddie drank and roistered with Nazi secret service men on his reward money. Then the Germans asked him to go on another mission. Eddie refused until they met his price: -L-50,000, payable on his return. In mid-1944 Eddie once again parachuted into England, and set up his wireless in a London suburb. With Eddie's help, British intelligence systematically misreported the location of V-2 hits, gradually moved the Germans' center of fire from the heavily populated heart of London into the sparsely settled suburbs. And again, Eddie kept the money (-L-6,000 this time) the Nazis furnished him with.

The Persecuted. After the war, Eddie appeared again in his old London haunts, debonair as ever and free as air, despite his record of 47 safecracking jobs. To ' anyone who wondered, he had the full story ready. But he had a grudge. The War Office would let him tell only half the story publicly--that he had spied for the Nazis. Once, when he tried to get into print with the other side, they haled him into court and fined him -L-50 under the Official Secrets Act.

Eddie began to complain that he was persecuted. He had hired a surplus landing craft to run cargoes into Britain from Ireland and France, added a small steamship, then a small aircraft in which he made frequent "business" trips to that black-marketeer's heaven, Tangier. Wherever he landed, police were waiting to question or search him. Frequently his ships were stopped and searched. Persecution, cried Eddie, because of his disagreements with the government. But when Eddie ran into real trouble on a currency transaction charge, a senior officer from the War Office appeared uninvited to testify that Eddie was "one of the bravest men who served in the last war." Yet when his biography (The Eddie Chapman Story) appeared six weeks ago, and began to be serialized in the papers, the War Office cut out all references to his services to Britain.

Last week Eddie was making his merry rounds of pub and club, brash and bumptious and complaining of his wrongs. Far away on Africa's Gold Coast, a scandal had broken (TIME, Jan. 11), with charges of bribery of government officials. As so often when things happened, it turned out that Eddie had been near by. Eddie, it appeared, had spent much of the past two years wining and dining Gold Coast ministers, while his pretty, blonde wife became so friendly with bachelor Prime Minister Nkrumah that she did his shopping and supervised his menus. And somehow, every firm that hired Eddie had got a fat government contract. Said Eddie cheerfully from London: "These people were my friends. I didn't have to bribe them." '

There was also a spot of trouble in London. Eddie was charged with assaulting a man in a pub brawl, and in the process, relieving a drinking companion of -L-19 without his consent. Police hounding, said Eddie. But the judge fined him -L-5 and costs for assault. This time no War Office officer came to speak for him. But for the first time, the War Office last week confirmed that Eddie's version of his war services was true.

Eddie took it as no more than his due. The robbery charge still hung over him, but Eddie did not let that bother him.

Jose Ferrer and his new wife Rosemary Clooney were flying in, and Eddie organized a gang of mutual friends to meet them at the airport--all stumping on their knees and dressed in beards and bowlers like so many Toulouse-Lautrecs. Everybody laughed and laughed and agreed Eddie was one in a million.

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