Imprisoned on Jersey at the beginning of the war, Eddie Chapman falls into the hands of the Nazi occupiers and, in order
to save his life, offers to spy for them. Amazingly this offer is eventually accepted and, after training by the Abwehr, he is parachuted into a Cambridgeshire field on a December night in 1942. His mission is to sabotage the British war effort, but instead he turns himself over to the Double Cross committee of MI5 where he becomes one of the most, if not the most, important of British double agents.
A hero within a traitor, a villain within a man of conscience, Eddie Chapman was the most outrageous of spies. Louche, courageous and unpredictable his exploits beggar belief. As an
agent of MI5 once quoted, “The story of Eddie Chapman is different. In fiction it would be rejected as improbable.”
Ben Macintyre keeps the reader gripped in this unbelievable tale of the life of a crook who became one of the most vital sources of intelligence for the British government during the Second World War. This is undoubtedly a book well worth reading.