The story of Eddie Chapman, the most famous double agent of World War II. The backdrop for this dizzying biography was the dramatic and bloody events of the mid-20th century, the incredible successes and discouraging mistakes of the intelligence services of the British Empire and the Third Reich, the “silent war” of mathematicians and counterintelligence officers for the enemy’s secret codes, the impossible interweaving of destinies - in a word, everything that we are used to seeing in twisted spy novels. The difference is that “Agent Zigzag” by Ben McIntyre is, although fascinating in form, a serious biographical study in the scale of the work done, based on archival documents of the British counterintelligence MI5 recently opened to historians.