The Hornet's Sting (36 page)

If the elimination of Sneum was soon to become a priority for the Germans in Denmark, it had long been high on the agenda for the selfstyled Princes of Danish Intelligence. They had recently made fresh contact with Ronnie Turnbull, as usual through the Danish journalist Ebbe Munck, who offered to act as middleman for any proposed meeting. Turnbull continued to operate from the safety of Stockholm, where he lived comfortably with his wife and young son. So, if the Princes wanted a face-to-face meeting with him, one of their number would have to make the journey across the Oeresund. However, Hans Lunding didn’t need to cross the perilous ice sheets on foot. Even as Kaj Oxlund and Thorbjoern Christophersen perished on the route he had mapped out for them, Lunding was using his lofty position to arrange his passage by ice-cutter from Copenhagen to Malmo. On the afternoon of 6 March, just hours after Kaj and Thorbjoern had lost their fight for life, he carved his way across the Oeresund and reached the British Legation in Stockholm without incient.

For Turnbull, this visit represented the culmination of a year’s careful diplomacy. Ever since his arrival in Stockholm, he had been in awe of the Princes. Later he admitted: ‘I’ve always been a bit of a hero-worshipper in all my activities with people who know what they’re doing.’ Now the Scot knew that his stock would be rising as he provided the link between Danish Intelligence and SOE Headquarters in London. And this was a relationship which had the potential to give SOE the upper hand over SIS, especially now that the latter organization’s agents were in such trouble—with one of them in Swedish custody and the other likely to be uncovered before long by the Danish police. Looking back, Turnbull acknowledged as much: ‘I was to one extent lucky in that when I arrived in the middle of that terrible crisis, SIS themselves were in some kind of a mess with their man in Denmark. So that the people [from Danish intelligence] started orientating themselves towards me as being the only person they were willing to talk to.’

But Lunding still knew no more about SOE than Tommy Sneum knew about SIS. As far as each man was concerned, he was simply dealing with ‘the British.’

Turnbull’s meeting with Lunding took place at the house of the Swedish SOE chief, Sir Peter Tennant. It continued into the early hours of the following day, and Lunding used the occasion to present the so-called P-Plan formally, on the understanding that it would be passed up the chain of command to British Chiefs of Staff as quickly as possible. This plan promised a coordinated uprising against the Germans by a secret Danish army on a given signal from London. The timing would be all important, since it had to correspond precisely with an Allied invasion of Denmark. In order to ensure maximum impact, argued Lunding, in the meantime the Danes would give the impression that they were happy to cooperate with the German occupation.

Turnbull listened enthusiastically to a proposal that effectively provided the Danes with a chance to sit on the fence until the very last stages of the war. He agreed to the P-Plan wholeheartedly, and shared Lunding’s opinion that, for now and the foreseeable future, it was best to do nothing to make the German occupation any less stable or comfortable.

Seeing that he had the young Scot in the palm of his hand, Lunding next sought and received a guarantee that no more British agents would be sent into Denmark without the Princes’ consent. He argued that too much chaos had already been caused by those dropped the previous year. Since neither man had any knowledge of the scientific intelligence uncovered by Sneum, or indeed the links he had established with Duus Hansen, it’s easy to see why Lunding and Turnbull were in complete agreement about future policy. Politically, at least, Sneum’s fate was all but sealed by the guidelines they drew up.

Turnbull enthusiastically encoded the P-Plan and added his own personal endorsement. Later that day he sent his communication to Ralph Hollingworth in London:

So, a matter of hhroafter the heroic Kaj Oxlund had met a dreadful end on the ice, Hans Lunding had turned the misfortunes of Denmark’s SIS spy circle to his advantage. For his part, Turnbull had made it clear that he wanted London to call off any mission that might cause an unwelcome ripple in Copenhagen. Had there been any substance to the Princes’ P-Plan, this might have been a sensible strategy. Had the Princes not already missed the Freya radar stations in their own back yard, the break-out of the
Bismarck
, Copenhagen’s importance as an intellectual battlefield in the atom-bomb race, and the importance of Duus Hansen, they might well have been able to claim with justification that they were the right men to handle British affairs in Denmark. In simple terms, the P-Plan made the Princes and Ronnie Turnbull look good. It would also make the ill-fated SIS operation look even uglier than it already was.

As he returned to Denmark, Lunding now felt free to decide how best to deal with Tommy Sneum.

Meanwhile, Gerda Nielsen had the grim task of visiting Tulle Oxlund in hospital and telling her that the man they had both loved was dead.

B
Y 12 MARCH 1942, events were taking a turn for the worse in Malmo. Having given Sneum a little time to take evasive action, Sigfred Christophersen was persuaded by Kriminal-Kommissarie Runerheim to start telling the truth. The Swedes knew that he was not Erik Moeller, and Runerheim warned him that to continue to lie would make matters even worse for him. As soon as Christophersen gave his real name and began to tell his story, Runerheim called Politikommissaer Odmar in Copenhagen and invited him over to take part in the interrogation. At the highest level, the Abwehr’s chief in Denmark, Albert Howoldt, would also want to know of this vital breakthrough. But first Odmar needed to be sure that he had the whole story, and that any threat of subversion had passed. Otherwise there might be a danger that the Nazis would carry out reprisals against the Danish population for any cooperation they had afforded the spies while they remained free.

Knowing what might be at stake, Odmar was soon conducting Christophersen’s interrogations personally. And Sigfred was almost as forthcoming as Tommy Sneum had feared. Perhaps he was still in shock after his ordeal, because once he had decided to admit that he had been sent from Britain, it would have been sensible to claim he was the sole survivor of the December drop that had killed Carl Bruhn. Christophersen admitted that he had read newspaper reports about that incident, so he knew it was in the minds of his interrogators. Had he used the story, he might have convinced the Danish police that there were no other British agents in the country. Instead, he revealed that he had parachuted into Denmark in September, and even added that he had not come alone. He also confessed that the objective of the mission had been to send intelligence back to Britain on a variety of subjects. Not content with admitting that he was a British spy, though, he revealed the amount of time he had spent in England training for the mission. Worse still, he told Odmar how many times a day he could transmit to Britain during peak periods of activity, and the precise frequency he used. It was only a small consolation that he had at least destroyed his codes before setting foot on the ice.

Together with these astonishing revelations about the mission came a detailed account of virtually his entire life story. Christophersen’s fear of Sneum—and the certain knowledge that the latter would kill him one day if his identity were betrayed—was probably all that kept him from giving away his partner’s name too.

Even so, the Danish police now had enough information to piece together the rest of the story. They discovered that Sigfred’s brother Thorbjoern had worked for Werner Gyberg, the man who set up Tommy Sneum’s first meeting with Duus Hansen. They promptly arrested Gyberg, which left Sneum and Duus Hansen one step from disaster, relying solely on the businessman’s defiance under interrogation. The only glimmer of hope lay in the fact that the Germans hadn’t yet joined in the questioning in a bid to break him.

But even with the Danish police running the show, the future looked grim. Though they knew nothing about Duus Hansen’s involvement, they had already put two and two together and realized that Christophersen’s fellow agent was Tommy Sneum. There had been the unconfirmed sighting in the florist’s near Emmy’s house, which had prompted the enquiry about Sneum from one of Bertelsen’s police colleagues. Then, in the aftermath of the tragedy on the ice, Oxlund’s neighbors, in particular his caretaker, had given the police detailed descriptions of Kaj’s associates. One such description bore an uncanny resemblance to Sneum, and the caretaker had confirmed that this man, ‘The Aviator’, had also been seen at Oxlund’s address prior to the occupation. It didn’t take much investigation to establish that Oxlund and Sneum had been longstanding friends. ‘The Aviator’ had been aptly nicknamed, for the Danish police began to realize that Sneum must have survived his flight in the Hornet Moth and reached England the previous summer. And now there was plenty of evidence to suggest that he had returned as a spy. Tommy had suddenly become the most wanted man in Denmark.

Fortunately for Sneum, though, he held one advantage over the police—some of their own detectives were on his side. Amazingly, the Copenhagen force had never made the connection between Niels-Richard Bertelsen and his brother-in-law. And so, in the early hours of 14 March, Bertelsen and Sneum were able to enter Odmar’s office and read a report detailing precisely what Christophersen had revealed up to that point.

With his worst fears confirmed, Tommy cursed his British spymaster, Rabagliati, for ignoring his warnings before the mission had even begun. But he also cursed himself, for not killing Christophersen when he had the chance. He knew the Danish police would now check all his old contacts and visit his regular haunts. More than ever, it was time to behave in a way the Danish authorities would least expect. ‘At the time, I was very much concerned about staying alive, and that’s why I moved into the Hotel Astoria,’ Sneum explained later. ‘I thought it was the one place where the people who were hunting me would never think to look.’

On the face of it, there was nothing wrong with the Astoria: the architecture was a little grim, but that made it no different to many hotels situated next to a city’s central railway station. What made it a curious choice as a spy’s hideaway was the fact that it was inhabited by half of the middle-ranking German officers in Denmark. It was a place where some of Hitler’s luckier soldiers could enjoy a convivial atmosphere, free from the rigours of enforcing an occupation. Ideally placed to welcome colleagues on their arrival in Denmark, the hotel was also a handy venue when giving units a send-off before they were transferred esewhere.

In a further gamble, Tommy made no attempt to deceive any of the German officers in the Astoria about his naval past. He was quite happy for it to be known that he had been a flight lieutenant in Fleet Air Arm. The way he saw it, he needed the respect and friendship of the Germans in order to make the location work for him. Outrageously, he even used his real name when he introduced himself, confident that he was building a reputation among longerterm residents as an ally and occasional source of information. Meal times meant shared tables, and he tried to keep his cool as he ate with men who could make his worst nightmares come true. ‘I just laughed as they tried to test me,’ he remembered. ‘It seemed to work.’