The Hornet's Sting (48 page)

On 22 March 1943, MI5 gave Major Geoffrey Wethered the task of investigating penetrations into both SOE and SIS. He therefore took over responsibility for finding the traitor among the Danish in England from his predecessor, a Major Blunt. On 9 April, Wethered gave an account of events that would put a new question mark against Sneum’s loyalty, particularly in relation to Mogens Hammer and the wave of SOE agents sent into Denmark the previous year, known as ‘Table Top’:

Wethered also describes Hollingworth’s suspicions with regard to the Princes, also known as the HAMILCAR organization:

By now, almost two years had passed since the Princes had ‘missed’ the breakout by the
Bismarck
, but clearly they were still up to their old tricks, judging by these remarks. It seems that by the spring of 1943, both MI5 and SOE felt that no Dane could be fully trusted. One man was more guilty than the rest, however—the mystery spy who had fed German Intelligence and then disappeared.

Wethered could not rest until he had that traitor in his sights. At some point over the next month, he or a member of his investigation team visited Sneum in Milton Ernest to interrogate him. They suspected he was the traitor and said so. Sneum pointed to the facts. He had been in prison in Brixton throughout the summer of 1942, and effectively under local arrest in Milton Ernest ever since. How could he have known anything? And even if he had been given any information about Danish operations, how could he have passed that intelligence on to the Germans?

Given the earlier warning he had received from Otto Gregory—that there were people in London who wanted him liquidated—the latest accusations spelled grave danger for Tommy. He was living in an isolated place, so he decided it would make sense from that point on to make sure civilians were never far away from him. He claimed: ‘Even in Bedfordshire it began to feel like I was always under threat of death. I had those bastards coming out to the farm but they couldn’t kill me openly.’

Where Wethered’s team of investigators were concerned, however, Tommy needn’t have worried. On 26 April 1943, Wethered submitted a short report on the likelihood or otherwise of Sneum being the traitor. It was entitled: ‘B1b. note re. case of SNEUM and TABLE TOP organization 74X.’ MI5 withheld it from a file labelled KV6/40, which was otherwise made available at the National Archive in Kew, west London, some sixty years later. On 11 July 2006, however, the Security Service revealed this much: ‘the gist of 74X in KV6/40 is that SNEUM was not in any position to leak to the Germans information regarding TABLE TOP.’

Although this confirmed that Thomas Sneum was still suspected of treachery as late as spring 1943, it also revealed that Wethered was convinced that Sneum simply couldn’t have been the traitor, due to the physical constraints he was under at the time of the leaks. Effectively, that meant Sneum was off the hook. But Tommy’s former spymasters wouldn’t have been pleased when unforeseen circumstances allowed him to return into wider social circulation.

S
INCE JOHN CHRISTMAS MOELLER had exerted so much pressure to have Sneum released from Brixton Prison, he now bore much of the responsibility for his fellow countryman’s future. Therefore, Sneum was quickly moved to London and housed in Christmas Moeller’s basement flat. He was even given a job in the politician’s office, which mainly consisted of translating documents. His opinion was sometimes sought on the quality of various snippets of intelligence which found their way through from Denmark. But Sneum still felt like a spectator, cheated of his place at the center of the action.

By night, however, he was anything but a passive observer as he made up for lost time by trying to bed as many women as possible. ‘In those days, it felt like I only had to take a woman by the hand and she would go straight to bed with me,’ he admitted with a chuckle. ‘I even had two women at the same time, but I didn’t like it when they started giving each other attention when they should have been giving it all to me.’ He brought many of his conquests back to his new home, and it seemed as though his appetite was insatiable. ‘I found I could stay up for three nights and four days without sleeping,’ he claimed.

His hosts soon found it hard to turn a blind eye to his playboy lifestyle, and Christmas Moeller’s wife, Gertrud, finally lost patience and insisted that Sneum be confronted about his behavior. The politician called his guest into the main house and came straight to the point: ‘You run around with too many girls, Sneum. Sooner or later it’s going to get you into serious trouble.’

‘I’m in trouble already,’ joked Tommy. ‘Some of them can be terribly jealous and suspicious.’

Gertrud insisted that it was no laughing matter. ‘We felt sorry for you when you were in prison,’ she explained. ‘We can understand that you want to enjoy yourself after being locked up all that time. But you have a wife in Denmark and you’re leading a life of debauchery here, Tommy. There’s no other way of putting it. You should love your wife.’

‘What’s the point of loving a woman in Denmark when I’m in England?’ asked Tommy with unanswerable logic.

But Christmas Moeller backed his wife: ‘It’s not acceptable, Sneum. Remember, this is our household and we make the rules, even for the cellar flat. No more women—agreed?’

Sneum was too stubborn to have the terms of his private life dictated to him. ‘How can I agree to something like hat?’ he asked in desperation.

Gertrud was prepared for just such a response. ‘Then my husband and I have no alternative but to tell you that you are no longer welcome to stay here.’

John Christmas Moeller clearly regretted that it had come to this. ‘From now on you’ll have to live with my secretary, Peter Knauer. And I should warn you that Peter’s wife had a strict upbringing in Australia, and she won’t put up with any of your nonsense. Besides, you won’t have your own flat any more, just a room. Since you have abused your newfound freedom, you will now have less of it.’

Sneum recalled: ‘I carried on having affairs but Christmas was right—Mrs Knauer didn’t like it.’ For a week or two, he would fall deeply in love with a woman, before he reminded himself that he was essentially in love with all women. He remembered: ‘I fell in love with a doctor from Kensington Hospital. Her mother was English, her father from Senegal. Her name was Audrey and she was lovely. In fact she was the most beautiful girl you could ever imagine. She wasn’t very sexual at the start but I soon made her feel sexy.’

At the time, Sneum was socializing with another member of the Danish resistance who had managed to escape, Ole Killerich. Although he was older than Tommy, they had much in common. ‘He had gone to live with Emmy Valentin after I had left for England, and he had shagged her before coming to London,’ revealed Sneum. Now their romantic paths almost crossed again. ‘Killerich was in love with Audrey’s friend, another doctor from Kensington Hospital. The two women were colleagues and close to each other, so we all got on very well together.’

Despite his romantic distractions, Sneum noticed that he was still followed occasionally. It was as if someone had decided that a grave mistake had been made in granting him freedom. And he knew that it wasn’t just elements within SIS who harbored lingering doubts about him. Fortunately for Tommy, though, he still had many female admirers in the close-knit Danish community. One was a former secretary to Commander Frank Stagg, the SOE officer who felt that Sneum’s imprisonment was ‘disgraceful.’ Although Stagg had since left SOE, disillusioned that his efforts to persuade the British to work more closely with the Danes had fallen on deaf ears, his secretary had remained in the Danish Section.

‘I had a relationship with this girl from SOE for a while,’ Sneum said. ‘And she warned me that they were still suspicious of me and following me.’

These hostile undercurrents didn’t lead Sneum to modify his playboy lifestyle, however. During the war, the general feeling was that time was short, and life should be enjoyed while it still could be. It was a philosophy also embraced by Sneum’s former spy partner, although his idea of personal fulfilment was rather more traditional.

Sigfred Christophersen was no longer working for SIS, but he had become involved with someone extremely well connected to that murky world. Perhaps it was more than coincidence that he had chosen to court a private secretary in the Foreign Office. If he had wanted to cultivate further ill-feeling towards Sneum in the corridors of power, he could hardly have chosen a better channel for his bitterness. Mary Anita Blackford Wood was five years younger than Christophersen, who had now turned twenty-eight. As romance blossomed, the couple soon realized they had much in common, since their families shared a background in market gardening. Sigfred’s father was a nurseryman, and had introduced his son to the trade before the war. Anita’s father was a horticultural contractor, and she too retained a keen interest in plants and flowers.

Thanks to her administrative role in the Foreign Office, Anita already knew something of Sigfred’s story. But it appears that he soon gave her full details of how Sneum had repeatedly threatened to kill him during their mission. She must also have learned of Christophersen’s escape to Sweden, and how his brother Thorbjoern and Kaj Oxlund had died so horribly on the ice. It seems that Sigfred soon convinced Anita that there was only one villain of the piece—Tommy Sneum. He also warned her that if, for any reason, he should die unexpectedly or mysteriously, Sneum would probably be behind it.

Anita foresaw a happier future, especially when Sigfred proposed. Although he had known her only a matter of months, this was wartime and strong bonds were often forged quickly. Anita accepted and their wedding day was fixed for 2 June 1943. The ceremony was held at the Register Office in Anita’s home town of St. Albans.

By then, Sigfred was Pilot Officer 151948 of the RAF and stationed far to the north, in Harrogate, Yorkshire. However, he was given a special weekend pass to tie the knot, and the couple spent their wedding night in a St. Albans hotel. Unfortunately, with the war never far away, there was no time for a proper honeymoon. That following Monday, Anita Christophersen returned to her duties at the Foreign Office. Her husband was already back in the cockpit in Yorkshire, preparing for the day when his skills might be needed against the fighters of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

Thomas Sneum would have given anything to be able to fly again and test himself in real action. His work translating and summarizing intelligence reports in John Christmas Moeller’s office was occasionally interesting, but Tommy hated working indoors. He knew that a daring spy wasn’t meant to sit behind a desk.