The Hornet's Sting (43 page)

As the police car carrying the three Danes crossed the Thames and moved purposefully through Clapham, Tommy began to wonder if something had gone wrong. Then he remembered that the Royal Patriotic School, where he had been vetted following the Hornet Moth flight, was near by. Perhaps he would face another interrogation there. Disturbingly, however, the car took them even further south, far beyond the school’s location. It soon reached Brixton, where the driver turned off the main road and down a side street. Sneum saw vast walls rising above the houses and the daunting arch of an iron gate. Before he knew it, Brixton Prison had swallowed the police vehicle, and Tommy found himself incarcerated yet again.

T
OMMY SNEUM DEMANDED to see Brixton Prison’s governor. His request was refused. Instead he was again separated from Helvard and Christophersen and thrown into a small cell in the bowels of the jail. He tried to ignore the familiar stale smell. It was best to be positive and patient while he waited for Rabagliati to arrive. Though his cell was no more than four meters long and two meters wide, even more cramped than his home of the last couple of months in Malmo, he tried to see the funny side. This wasn’t the best of British welcomes, but what did it matter? He wouldn’t be staying inside for long.

When the door was unlocked and Tommy was escorted along the corridor to a dimly lit interrogation room, he still wasn’t unduly worried. He expected the confusion to be resolved quickly, so that he could be back in the outside world before nightfall.

A British Army officer, no more than twenty-four and rather too proud of his pencil-thin moustache, was waiting to conduct the interrogation. He was an MI5 interrogator and he had clearly been expecting the new prisoner. The initial exchanges seemed friendly enough, if clinical and routine. Tommy willingly gave his name and rank, before being invited to tell the complicated story of his mission, from the moment he had landed in the Danish countryside. Hour after hour, he explained the difficulties he had encountered, from the misjudged parachute drop to the break-up of the Oeresund ice during his last escape. He was careful to include in his account the successes that had made his mission to Nazi-occupied Denmark worthwhile. The only questions he refused to answer concerned his contacts in the field, because he wanted to protect their identities. Rabagliati had told him before his departure that he was entitled to withhold names during any initial interrogation on his return. They would sit down together for a more detailed debrief in due course, he imagined.

Sneum’s evasive tactics didn’t seem to impress MI5. As he stubbornly resisted the pressure, the atmosphere began to change. The young officer began to focus on Tommy’s imprisonment in Sweden, and the information he had divulged there. Sneum insisted that Christophersen had told the Swedes most of those details already, but the interrogator disagreed. Sneum, it was pointed out, gave away not only his real name but the whereabouts in Copenhagen of their radio. Tommy explained the logic behind this, and emphasized that his Danish friends had designed far better radios since, therefore leaving the Germans with a misleading idea of the technology now available to the Allies. He also pointed out th he had been encouraged to cooperate to an extent, in order to secure his release.

It didn’t take very long for the young interrogator to come to the most damaging chapter of Sneum’s detention in Malmo—his threat to expose Swedish agents in Poland and Germany. ‘You were going to betray us,’ the officer suggested.

Tommy began to realize that the Swedish and Polish names he had committed to memory weren’t working solely for Sweden, but also for the Allies. Naturally, that left him with some explaining to do. ‘That was a bluff,’ he insisted. ‘I only brought that threat into play when they had kept me in jail too long.’

The interrogator shook his head. ‘From what I can see, you would quite happily have blown an entire organization. They didn’t think you were bluffing.’

Tommy smiled at this. ‘My dear fellow, that is the idea of a bluff.’

The interrogator wasn’t convinced by this defense. He also had information on Sneum’s whereabouts during the penultimate week of March, when he had stayed at the Astoria in Copenhagen. The British knew that this was a hotel frequented by German officers and Nazi sympathizers, and they didn’t buy Tommy’s claim that he had decided to hide in the last place anyone would expect him to be. Nor was Sneum very tactful when he freely admitted that he had enjoyed the company of many of these Germans, just as he had enjoyed mixing with Abwehr officers in the Hotel Cosmopolit the previous year.

Sneum explained later: ‘The Brixton interrogators said I had been trying to deliver all Britain’s secrets to the Germans. I told them they were talking nonsense, because the Danes I had contacted to set up the resistance were still working. If I had really squealed, they would have been stopped. But the English couldn’t cope with the fact that I liked some Germans.’

The young interrogator was staggered by this confession, but Tommy was determined not to sound ashamed of what he had done, and insisted that fraternizing with the enemy had paid off handsomely. He recalled: ‘I told the British this: “If you want proper information about the enemy, you should be grateful that a man had the courage to go in and make friends with them and get that information.”’ He was able to give the names of some German officers, albeit admitting that he didn’t think those names were genuine, since it was common practice for everyone in that community to use aliases.

The interrogator seemed far from satisfied and the exchanges became more heated. Tommy accused the young officer of being naïve, and he attacked the British for their xenophobia. ‘I think the majority of regular German Army people are decent and well disciplined. Most are also against Hitler,’ he dared to suggest.

‘If you regard the Germans so highly, why didn’t you stay over there with them?’ came the reply.

‘What do you actually know about Germany?’ Tommy fired back accusingly. ‘Did you get good information or not?’

To the interrogator’s ears, Tommy was sounding ever more like a collaborator or, worse still, a double-agent. So the British officer voiced a theory that the Princes had shared for some time: that Sneum couldn’t have escaped from Denmark in the Hornet Moth the previous summer without German help. Tommy pointed out that, were he really a double-agent, he ld hardly have warned the British about the claims of a drunken Abwehr officer, who had boasted that the Germans still had an effective spy ring in Britain, and received ‘running information’ from it.

But since Sneum wasn’t more specific, this did little to strengthen his case, because the British had more substantial allegations against him, from his very own spy partner. Christophersen had already accused Tommy of inventing the radio message ordering him over to Sweden, the one that had effectively sent Thorbjoern Christophersen and Kaj Oxlund to their deaths. Astonishingly, Sneum freely admitted that he had done just that.

‘I told the British what I had done when they interrogated me,’ he confirmed later. ‘I said that Christophersen was my radio operator, and I had the right to get rid of him if he wasn’t doing his job. It had been the only way I could get him out without killing him. I had tried to solve the problem quietly.’ On this point, at least, the British seemed to accept Tommy’s reasoning, as he revealed: ‘After that the British never bothered me about it.’

One problem for Sneum was his refusal to come up with the names of people who could support his story about Christophersen’s loss of nerve, or indeed Tommy’s own loyalty to the British cause. He had decided to protect the identity of Duus Hansen, for example, who had gently sided with Sneum in his dispute with Christophersen. Indeed, until he could talk to someone he knew he could trust, he was determined that the identities of all of those who had given him assistance in Denmark would remain secret.

He demanded to see either Colonel Ramsden or Otto Gregory, and asked for a message to be sent to R.V. Jones, the scientific expert. When he received no satisfactory response, he played what he thought was his strongest card: namely, that he had important information about a German bomb that might soon be powerful enough to blow up the whole of south-east England. ‘I told them I didn’t want the Germans to win the war because of this bomb. I suggested that the British make one themselves or steal one from the Germans.’

This seemingly outlandish claim about a super-bomb was met with derision, probably because the young interrogator was far too junior to have heard about the potential for such a development. But the warning was doubtless passed up the intelligence line for further analysis, where it would have been treated much more seriously. Indeed, when Tommy tried to raise the subject again during a subsequent interrogation, he was told urgently: ‘Forget about it! Shut up!’

Tommy observed later:

Ironically, however, Tommy’s information about German efforts to make an atom bomb were already out of date. In autumn 1941 the Allies and Germany had both come to a crossroads in their respective nuclear-fission programs. But during the first half of 1942 the Allies had forged ahead in the race, while the Nazis, and in particular the new Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Albert Speer, had recently been advised by Professor eisenberg that such a weapon could not be built in time to make a difference to the war.

If the British knew that the Germans had scaled down their efforts, it might even have sounded to them as though Tommy had been ‘turned’ and that he was trying to strengthen the Nazis’ bargaining position should they ever need to sue for peace. To those in Britain who knew nothing about the potential for an atom bomb, however, Sneum’s claims would have sounded staggering in their gravity, especially his first radio communication to that effect, sent in partnership with Duus Hansen from Denmark in January 1942. As an old man, Tommy alleged: ‘Otto Gregory told me that when he talked to his superiors at the Air Ministry about my atom-bomb intelligence, they said it was the biggest and most important news they ever got.’

Whatever the truth about the way in which the British intelligence community greeted and assessed Sneum’s claims, the sensitivity of the issue meant it was safer to keep him under lock and key. Tommy was a one-off, very hard to read, and the pressure from his interrogators as they tried to break him down was sustained and unpleasant. The faces sometimes changed, but the questions remained the same. Sneum was interviewed for at least ten hours on that first day, with several intelligence officers working in shifts. On the second day, the process started all over again, and lasted from morning until evening. The third day brought the same exhausting routine as he was subjected to more verbal abuse from eager young British officers.

‘I was interrogated by God-knows-how-many different British intelligence people,’ he said. ‘The questioning was relentless.’

They had clearly been well briefed on the situation in Denmark, but seemed to have no idea about the harsh realities of an agent’s struggle to survive. Time and again the interrogators returned to what they knew for sure—that Sneum had threatened to expose Swedish spies in Nazi-occupied Europe. They rejected his insistence that he was fundamentally loyal to the Allied cause and had been forced to fight dirty, simply regarding his tactics as outright treachery.

Tommy wondered when the British people who knew him best—Rabagliati, Gregory and Jones—might walk through the door to call off the dogs, as had happened the previous June. This summer, however, there was no respite and the questions kept coming as the days rolled by. With each interrogation, MI5 seemed to demand ever more detail, as though Tommy should be able to remember absolutely everything he had done, on each individual day, for seven months. It seemed as though the British were trying to catch him out at every turn. If he gave a solid account of an event to one interrogator, it was seized upon and used against him by the next. At the height of summer, with little food or water, this relentless pressure was exhausting. Sneum felt as though he were edging along a high wire, with the British determined to make him trip and fall. He was numb with fatigue and confusion.