Playtone’s Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are producing the film of Nicholas Booth’s book “ZigZag”, the definitive story of Eddie Chapman: Britain’s greatest, and most unlikely, WWII double agent.
A pre-war safebreaker, Eddie was on the run from British justice when he was captured in Jersey and trained by the Germans as an agent: he became the only German spy to be parachuted into Britain – twice. But Eddie was working for the British all along with the codename ZigZag.
Booth’s book reveals:
* How Eddie became the only British national – and indeed the only Jew – ever to be awarded an Iron Cross
* How he fooled the Germans into believing that he had sabotaged the De Havilland aircraft factory.
* How the British secret service used him to rob the Polish Embassy after the war and wanted him to spy in the Soviet Union.
‘Fiction has not, and probably never will, produce an espionage story to rival in fascination and improbability the true story of an English crook, Edward Arnold Chapman, whom only war could invest with any virtue.’ – Eddie’s MI5 file
