The Hornet's Sting (30 page)

Later, Tommy reflected that there might have been another reason why the argument was so fierce:

Personal issues aside, Sneum remained convinced that he had acted correctly by deterring the daughter of his landlady from embarking upon a career in espionage. Despite his romantic entanglement, he had tried to look at the proposal objectively, and on that basis he was sure that Birgit would eventually have been forced to betray them all. Furthermore, ‘Emmy was against Birgit going to Germany too,’ he said later.

As the project was aborted, the Princes wondered how they might gain control over Thomas Sneum, the maverick spy who seemed to be disrupting all of their best-laid plans.

Back in London, the Danish Section of the Special Operations Executive was extremely pleased with its latest recruitment coup. In Dr Carl Bruhn, they believed they had found the perfect man to lead their proposed new network in Denmark. All summer and autumn, blissfully unaware that MI6 was thinking along precisely the same lines but had worked more quickly, SOE had trained Bruhn and a radio operator called Mogens Hammer for a mission behind enemy lines in Denmark.

The London-based chief of the Danish Section, Commander Ralph Hollingworth, was delighted with the project. Later he would gush:

By then, however, it was December 1941, and Tommy Sneum had been operating in Denmark for three months. It was highly unlikely that Bruhn would do anything that Tommy hadn’t done already, but to the men who mattered in London that wasn’t the point. In the corridors of power, the battle for control of Denmark raged on. And, in spite of Ronnie Turnbull’s best efforts to convince them otherwise, the SOE hierarchy believed that the best way to win that battle was by putting their own men in the field. They were determined to prove that anything the SIS ‘professionals’ could do, they could do better. For their part, MI6’s spymasters were at pains to resist all interference from men they regarded as upstart amateurs.

T
OMMY DECIDED IT WOULD BE unacceptable to go down to Christmas lunch at 15 St. Annaegade without flowers for Emmy and Birgit’s table, so on Christmas Eve he left the building in disguise, wearing a pair of spectacles and a false moustache. He found a florist’s and was paying for an enormous bunch of red roses when he suddenly became aware of a woman staring at him. To his horror, he noticed out of the corner of his eye the wife of an old Fleet Air Arm colleague. He recalled that her family was pro-German, and therefore probably had contacts among the collaborationist elements of the Danish police. The woman was obviously wondering whether this could really be Thomas Sneum, and seemed ready to engage him in conversation in order to find out. His attempted escape by Hornet Moth that summer had become common knowledge among those who had known him, with many convinced that he had met his end in the North Sea. Now the woman might be thinking not only that he had survived against the odds, but that he had returned on some sort of secret mission for the Allies.

Tommy finished paying and left before she could say anything. However, he realized that he must now assume he had been compromised. Making his way back to Emmy’s with the flowers, he took several detours to ensure he wasn’t being followed. All the time, he was kicking himself for his carelessness. His life would now be in even more danger than before, and all for the sake of flowers that would fade and die within days.

As they ate their Christmas meal and tried to be cheerful, Sneum’s mind was elsewhere, uncharacteristic behavior when he was in the company of women. But by the end of the meal, a traditional Danish spread of cold meats and fish, there had been more than enough awkward silence, so he tried belatedly to lighten the atmosphere.

‘Are you doing anything interesting between now and New Year’s Eve, Emmy?’ he asked.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact: I’m going out with a number of high-ranking German officers. One of them,’ she added pointedly, ‘I intend to charm rather more than the others.’

Though she didn’t seem to want to elaborate in front of Birgit, it was clear to Sneum from Emmy’s expression that she was talking about the Abwehr officer who had claimed the war might be cut srt by German scientists.

On the night of 27 December, SOE agents Bruhn and Hammer jumped out of a British plane at Torpeskou, near Haslev, sixty-five kilometers south of Copenhagen. These must have been terrifying moments for the brilliant Dr Bruhn as he hurtled through the darkness and realized that his parachute hadn’t opened. He would never see his British wife, Dr Anne Connan, again. Some claimed later that he had forgotten to attach his parachute to the static line. Others blamed a faulty clip mechanism, and suggested that an important life had been wasted for want of a sturdy ‘safety pin.’

Whatever the truth, as Bruhn’s body smashed into the ground, Hammer knew nothing of the doctor’s fate. A tough seaman who had learned his skills on ships’ radios, Hammer looked for his partner but failed to find him. After an hour, he had no choice but to leave the drop-zone, having only partially concealed his own parachute. As he trudged away, he might have wondered why Bruhn had been assigned the suitcase that carried the radio transmitter. Already his mission looked in jeopardy. But soon events would take an even worse turn, with consequences not just for Hammer but for the two British agents who had been in Denmark since September.

The following morning a German patrol found Bruhn’s crushed body, along with the incriminating transmitter. Searching the area, they uncovered a second parachute and realized that one man was still at large. An order was promptly issued to all troops: ‘The first parachute drop of British agents on Danish soil took place during the night of 27/8 December near Koege. One of the agents is dead, but the other succeeded in escaping. As further parachute drops are to be expected, all troops are advised to be especially vigilant.’

Of course, the Germans had never known about the first parachute drop which had delivered Sneum and Christophersen into Denmark, but that was of little consolation to Tommy now, as the manhunt for British agents reached fever pitch. He presumed that the searches were due to the fact that he had been recognized in the florist’s shop on Christmas Eve.

So now, of four agents parachuted into Denmark, one was dead, another (Hammer) was bewildered and powerless to transmit as he reached the sanctuary of relatives in Copenhagen, and a third (Christophersen) was on the run and losing his nerve. Meanwhile, Sneum wasn’t aware that his predicament had been worsened by the intense competition between the two British intelligence agencies. All he knew was that he was now in deep trouble and would have to use all his cunning to evade capture.

On New Year’s Day, Emmy Valentin called into Sneum’s flat. She pulled out a napkin containing some crude sketches and explained that she had persuaded her Abwehr officer, after several bottles of wine, to draw some U-boat bays and the bomb shelters that housed them. They were all to be found at the docks in Kiel. He had even provided a map. ‘The officer was probably in love with Emmy, but even so I don’t know how the word “intelligence” could be used to describe him or his department after what he gave away that night,’ Sneum said later.

But Emmy hadn’t finished. She explained how she had asked her escort if he was depressed that there appeared to be no end in sight to the war, now that the German advance to Moscow had stalled in the Russian snow.

‘Don’t worrabout the war; it’ll soon be over,’ he repeated. When asked how he could be so sure, he replied, ‘We’ll soon have a little bomb powerful enough to blow the whole of south-eastern England to atoms.’

Sneum made her repeat the phrase. It still seemed too terrible to contemplate. Perhaps a drunken officer’s bravado had got the better of him, but Tommy knew the remark had to be taken seriously. Was such a bomb feasible? He had always been fascinated by physics, and possessed the intellect and imagination to grasp ideas that others might dismiss as too fantastic for serious consideration. His identification of a radar installation on Fanoe had demonstrated just such a flexible mind, though talk of a super-bomb was another matter entirely. Sneum knew he would have to call upon his contacts in the scientific community in order to check the Abwehr officer’s boastful claim.

In his youth, Tommy had been taught physics by Harald Bohr at a college in Copenhagen. Harald was the brother of Niels Bohr, the leading authority on nuclear physics, and Sneum realized that Niels might now be able to provide the key to understanding what the German had said. The problem was that Harald probably wouldn’t remember Tommy well enough to want to help him; and anyway, Niels was renowned as a very private individual who liked to spend his leisure time in the company of a select group of close friends. Fortunately for the British, though, Niels Bohr and Thomas Sneum had some mutual friends: two brilliant scientists who also happened to be resistance sympathizers. Bohr trusted both men implicitly. These were Professors Chiewitz and Hagedorn, the doctors who had helped Tommy after his painful landing back in September. Now Chiewitz was asked to contact Bohr on a matter of the utmost scientific urgency.

Tommy explained the relationship between the two men: