The Hornet's Sting (16 page)

In Acklington, Tommy and Kjeld were allowed to shower. To feel hot water on their backs instead of freezing fuel was glorious. They were treated to more hot food for lunch before being taken to their first interrogation. The inquisitors were Wing Commander Pringley, Flight Lieutenant Lord Tangerville and Flight Officer Forest. They were polite and their questioning remained relatively superficial. They never challenged the answers they received, which they wrote down officiously for some kind of preliminary report. Occasionally they sought simple clarification on an issue they didn’t understand. Sneum thought it was all too easy. He had a feeling that the serious business would be conducted elsewhere.

That afternoon Tommy and Kjeld were put in a car, driven to Regional Headquarters near the town of Morpeth, and told to relate their story from the beginning again. This time the questions were more searching, and the Danes’ answers were sometimes accepted with a detectable scepticism, although they were still never challenged outright. Sneum and Pedersen remained calm, knowing that patience would be the key to getting through this initial phase, and their composure seemed to have paid off when the British abruptly concluded proceedings and offered their uninvited guests a remarkable piece of hospitality. The ‘prisoners’ were escorted to a restaurant in Morpeth and treated to a lavish evening meal, free to choose from the menu like any other customers. The only sombre moment came when a radio broadcast from Winston Churchill announced that the Germans had invaded Russia.

Tommy said later, ‘When we heard all about Operation Barbarossa, we realized why we had managed to get through the previous night without being intercepted. Nearly all the Luftwaffe planes had already gone east.’

By the time the coffees arrived in the restaurant, however, so had two more officers, slightly older and wearing different, darker uniforms. Suddenly Sneum didn’t feel so lucky any more. The new arrivals were police sergeants—and being friendly wasn’t at the top of their agenda. The RAF men had no choice but to hand over their guests as arranged, and the mood soon changed. The natural camaraderie and mutual respect shared by airmen of every nation was replaced by the strained civility of their new escorts. In little more than half an hour, a police car had rushed the prisoners to Newcastle’s railway station, where they boarded a midnight train, closely followed by their guards.

The first smears of dawn had already turned to morning as Tommy and Kjeld were marched bleary-eyed out of London’s King’s Cross Station and ushered towards an unmarked police car.

As far as they could see, it was business as usual in England’s capital, with few visual signs of a country at war. They were driven through a sleepy West End and across the River Thames, until finally the car drew to a halt at the Royal Patriotic School for Orphan Daughters in Unity Street, Battersea. The large, neo-Gothic building had previously been home to a charitable institution. Now it was a vetting center for foreigners who had entered the country through unofficial channels. It had been adapted for this new role just five months before, and the chaos inside suggested that an efficient system had not yet been discovered.

For illegal aliens who failed to present a convincing case to the Allies, however, a swift and ruthless procedure did exist. Anyone deemed a security risk was shipped to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Many of the so-called impostors who were sent there would not be heard of again until the end of the war. Tommy and Kjeld didn’t realize it, but their individual wars, indeed their very freedom, would depend upon how they coped with questioning over the next twenty-four hours. And this time the interrogation would be extreme.

T
HOUGH IT WAS NO LONGER in his possession, Tommy was confident that the Movikon film of the Fanoe radar installation was already in London too. Therefore, he had every reason to believe that it would be only a matter of time before he and Pedersen were congratulated on their intelligence coup and offered the chance to join the Royal Air Force. He presumed that the film had already been developed and was now probably being watched by several senior British officers.

However, there was no evidence of that as yet. Sneum and Kjeld were taken into a spartan room, where they were directed towards a simple wooden table and invited to sit opposite each other on two hard chairs. To their surprise, they were then left alone, and it soon dawned on them why such unexpected breathing space had been offered. Tommy revealed: ‘They had installed microphones in our room, which we very quickly found.’

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The British guards didn’t return for some time, their superiors perhaps hoping for some slip of the tongue inside the cell. Eventually, though, the pilots were separated and taken to even smaller rooms, where the questioning began in earnest. Tommy found himself being interrogated by a fellow Dane, who gave his name as Seaman Peters. In fact he was a naval officer called Olaf Poulsen, and he seemed impressed by the quality of Sneum’s intelligence. He called in some British Royal Navy officers, who wanted to focus on two German ships Tommy had mentioned. It quickly occurred to Sneum that the
Nurnberg
and the
Schleswig-Holstein
might just provide his passage to freedom, so he told the fascinated naval men everything he knew about the vessels and their movements.

With the prospect of a Spitfire waiting for a new pilot on some English airfield, Tommy answered questions on a variety of topics as fully and helpfully as he could. In a later military report, he wrote of this interrogation:

At this point Tommy was placed in the hands of Squadron Leader Denys Felkin’s sharp and sceptical team of interrogators: Lieutenants Gregory and Siddons, accompanied by Flying Officer Sanky. The first two men, in particular, were experienced players, whose skills as inquisitors had been honed during their time with Air Ministry Intelligence. They had often dealt with foreign pilots who turned out to be exactly what they first seemed—brave souls who had escaped from occupied countries and were keen to fly against the Germans. However, the interrogators had also come across more complicated characters, men who seemed credible at first and then, after exhaustive forensic questioning, were exposed as German spies.

It wasn’t always easy to tell the difference between hero and traitor. MI5, the branch of British Intelligence that dealt with domestic security, believed that pilots, as a breed, made first-class spies because they invariably had a good eye for technical information. The interrogators from the Air Ministry had therefore been given a checklist to help them detect a secret agent:

1. Could the man be an enemy agent? In Sneum’s case the answer, in theory at least, was ‘yes.’
   
2. Does his general background make him a likely recruit or bring him within one of the categories that the enemy are known to favor in their search for recruits? Again, the answer in Tommy’s case was a strong ‘yes.’
   
3. Are there any possible points in his story suggesting recruitment, ing, dispatch? Another affirmative. Sneum had admitted to friendly contact with the enemy, having thought it more dangerous to make a secret of it. As for the escape itself, the British were finding it hard to believe that the Germans hadn’t assisted Tommy in some way. It was regular German practice to suggest to a recruited agent an ‘escape route’ from Nazi-occupied territory, and then call off their patrols on the given day to make sure their man got through. That way, under interrogation, the agent could draw largely on fact when asked to describe how he had reached Britain.
   
4. Is his whole story of a pattern indicating a German agent? Sneum’s MI5 interrogators must have been tempted to answer ‘yes’ to this question, too.
   

One might have expected the sheer volume of intelligence that Tommy had brought with him to have worked in his favor. In his report, he said of Gregory, Siddons and Sanky: ‘They got my sketches of the German airfields, and information about Anti-Aircraft Batteries around the country.’ But in the same document, he admitted: ‘The British had extremely good aerial photographs of all the existing German airfields in Denmark already.’

At least Sneum was able to report a more enthusiastic response from the Air Ministry interrogators: ‘Those people were especially interested in my information, films and Leica pictures of the German direction-finders on Fanoe.’ And yet even the Air Ministry officials suspected that they were being sucked into an elaborate sting. In theory, the Abwehr might have audaciously allowed this information to reach the British. Had the Germans decided that the British already knew enough about their radar activities to render Sneum’s new evidence a price worth paying for infiltration? Was this a brilliant ruse to get their man into direct contact with British Intelligence? The British couldn’t discount such a possibility at this stage, especially when it became clear that Sneum had enjoyed regular contact with the forces occupying his country.

He admitted later, ‘I told the interrogators at the Royal Patriotic School quite openly that I’d had contact with the Germans. That was how I had been able to get hold of much of the intelligence I had brought over. They didn’t seem to understand or accept this principle; they were suspicious of anyone who showed anything but outright hatred for all Germans.’

Though Sneum found the approach of his British hosts absurdly simplistic, even he could see why they were finding his account hard to swallow. He had filmed new technology at Fanoe right under the noses of the Germans. He had rebuilt a plane and flown it out of Nazi-occupied territory. He had stepped onto the wing for a spot of mid-air refuelling. Tommy remembered:

Before long there was a knock at the door. Gregory, normally a dashing, confident figure, seemed angry and embarrassed when the news was delivered, and with good reason. He had to turn back to Sneum and tell him what had happened. Tommy remembered his own anger at what he heard: