Page 416 - The Secret Museum

place. She explained that the archives of Bletchley Park are still top secret, not

because they are classified, but because there hasn’t been time to go through all the
cupboards, drawers and rooms packed with papers, telegrams and intelligence that
have lain unexplored since the war ended.

At that time, Bletchley Park was abandoned. It was nearly sold to property
developers in the 1990s, but was saved by veterans. It was turned into a museum, but
until 2010 it was short of funding. Gillian was then hired to begin work on the huge
unmined treasure trove of hundreds of thousands of maps and papers.

We had a nose around, pulling drawers open to reveal maps and books full of
telegrams. Some folders stuffed full of German intelligence are marked ‘TOP SECRET’

and others are marked ‘MOST SECRET’. ‘What is the difference?’ I asked. It turns out
they are the same thing, only the ‘most secret’ files date from before the Americans
came into the war. When American codebreakers joined the effort at Bletchley Park,
they weren’t sure what ‘most secret’ meant. ‘Is that, like, kind of secret, or what?’
they asked. Bletchley Park agents had to get lots of new rubber stamps, this time
marked ‘TOP SECRET’, so everything was crystal clear for their American pals.

In among all the telegrams and files was a message sent by Eddie Chapman,
Britain’s most successful double agent, nicknamed Agent Zigzag. Chapman had

always been a bit of a bad boy. As the Second World War began, he was in prison in
Jersey for a series of robberies. As a member of a ‘jelly gang’, he blew up safes
using gelignite – invented by Alfred Nobel. Chapman had made lots of money and,
before he was caught, for a while lived it up as a playboy in Soho.

When the Germans occupied Jersey in 1940, Chapman was still in jail. He was
desperate to get out and return to England to meet his new-born daughter. He offered
his services to the Germans as a spy, saying he wanted revenge on the British, who
had put him in prison. Eventually, after much deliberation and questioning, he was

hired.
The German Secret Service nicknamed him Little Fritz and trained him up. They

wanted him to attack an aircraft factory in Herefordshire which made Mosquito
bombers. In 1942, just before Christmas, he was thrown out of a plane above a field
in Cambridge and parachuted into a muddy field. Bletchley Park had been reading his
telegrams and had named him Agent X. They knew he was about to arrive and had
planned Operation Nightcap to find him. They didn’t have to try hard, because as
soon as he landed, he knocked on the door of a startled couple that lived in Ely and

turned himself into the police. He then became a double agent: Agent Zigzag.
He had been trained to send telegrams back to his German bosses, with a sign that

would let them know he had not been captured. The sign was five Fs – ‘FFFFF’ –
because of his nickname, Little Fritz. It was vital that he kept using this so that the
Germans would believe he was still working for them. He and the British MI5 faked
an attack on the Herefordshire factory, using a magician, Jasper Maskelyne, to create
an illusion. Even the factory staff believed their workplace had been destroyed. So