The Hornet's Sting (53 page)

Tommy’s next job title might have sounded boring, but it allowed him to travel and meet more women. He became administrative director of the European Association of Advertising Agencies. ‘I was always on the move and that suited me down to the ground,’ he said. ‘You can have a girlfriend in every town.’

But even confirmed womanizers are vulnerable; and in Munich, Germany, he fell in love with his third wife, a stunningly beautiful neurologist called Katherine. ‘She was twenty years younger than me and she stayed good-looking as she got older,’ observed Sneum. However, although Katherine gave him two more children, Christian and Alexandra, yet again the marriage didn’t last. Most women found Tommy’s forceful personality difficult to handle in the long run, and Katherine may have been too young at the time to cope with him. He raised the children in Switzerland, and though they probably didn’t see their mother as often as they would have liked, he did a good job.

By the time I met Tommy, Chris and Sandra had grown into fine adults and flown the nest, though they still helped their father to face the frustrating onset of old age whenever they could. I also met a middle-aged Marianne, his war baby with El, when she came to visit one day. The relationship between father and daughter was clearly strained, perhaps still a casualty of that war. Sneum was such an uncompromising character that in some ways he had become more isolated than he would have liked. But at least that meant he had time to sit down and tell his extraordinary story.

Time had changed Tommy’s appearance but not his views. He had made it his business both during and after the war to find out precisely who had been responsible for his imprisonment. In later life he was still bitter about Britain’s Special Operations Executive, and specifically blamed its Danish Section for what had happened to him: ‘The SOE were shits and sent people to their deaths without bothering about it,’ he alleged. ‘They always talked about fighting for England, but they were really fighting for their own positions. Hollingworth and Turnbull had never been in the field but they had me put in prison.’

In 1953, Hollingworth still sounded proud that SOE had won the spying game against SIS in Denmark when he answered a letter from the Danish historian Jorgen Hastrup:

What Hollingworth, with a touch of flippant triumphalism, described as ‘short-lived rivalry’ almost cost Sneum his life.

In the fullness of time, Ronnie Turnbull developed a healthier perspective. Although it was true that he never spied behind enemy lines, I learned that sending men to their deaths
did
bother him, particularly the Rasputin-like liquidation of Hans Henrik Larsen by his own side in Denmark, a killing which had been authorized by SOE in London. I heard this from Ronnie himself, having tracked him down to São Paulo, Brazil. He was perfectly happy to discuss the war years on the phone, and we developed a good relationship which we maintained in his final years. Tragically, his Brazilian wife Thereza, with whom he was so happy during the war, was killed in a car crash in Copenhagen way back in 1945. But his love affair with Brazil lived on, and eventually he remarried and moved there.

By the twenty-first century, after decades of speaking Portuguese, Turnbull’s Scottish lilt had taken on a strange, nasal quality, but the eighty-five-year-old often sounded half a century younger than he was. During one conversation I asked him about Sneum, and how SOE had effectively cast the SIS agent into the shadows in 1942.

‘At that stage, SOE wouldn’t have wanted to be involved in any dirty business against any individual agents,’ he maintained. ‘It may be there were wheels within wheels. A security problem rather than a political problem.’

It crossed my mind that there wouldn’t have been a ‘security problem’ had Tommy not been forced into a corner as a result of the ‘political problem’ of interdepartmental rivalry, but I didn’t want to interrupt Ronnie when it was all coming back to him.

‘Sneum,’ he continued. ‘Yes, he came in at a time when the Princes had a better idea and were very much in control. They woro Paulo,from a broader platform and they were able to deliver. I didn’t know to what extent Sneum had been trained and we decided to go with the Princes. They were the professionals.’

The whole story might have been very different if Tommy had bumped into Ronnie at the British Legation in Stockholm in February 1941, instead of meeting Donald Fleet and Henry Denham. If Turnbull had seen Sneum’s Freya radar intelligence, something the Princes had failed to supply or even understand, the Scotsman might not have been so dismissive of the spy who ended up working for SIS instead of SOE.

‘I didn’t give Sneum too much thought,’ admitted Ronnie.

‘Except when the Princes complained about him,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes, then I took notice,’ agreed Turnbull. ‘It was my duty to pass on that kind of information. I think Sneum was arrested in the end. Maybe it was his bad-tempered behavior. I think they picked him up in England.’

‘Weren’t you on the plane that took him to Scotland from Sweden?’ I enquired.

‘I don’t think so . . . I might have been. I don’t remember,’ Ronnie replied.

By the time he was locked up, Tommy understood the feasibility of the atom bomb, thanks to information supplied by Niels Bohr. Ironically, the man who eventually put Bohr on a plane from Stockholm to Britain on 30 September 1943 was none other than Ronnie Turnbull. But what had the Princes been able to tell Turnbull about the race to develop the atom bomb, given that they were supposedly the ‘professionals’ and ‘very much in control’?

‘I didn’t even know about it,’ admitted Turnbull.

I wondered whether Ronnie considered it a shame that Bohr had not been spirited out of Denmark earlier, to add his colossal intellect to the development of an Allied atom bomb. ‘I should have said so, yes,’ he replied, with refreshing honesty. Though he added, quite truthfully, ‘Bohr himself determined the timing.’

But how hard had the British tried to persuade Bohr to leave Copenhagen earlier? Even in 1943 neither the Princes nor Turnbull, by his own admission, understood the extraordinary scientific breakthrough that Bohr and Heisenberg had dared to debate in Copenhagen two years earlier. They were no more alert to atomic science than they had been to Freya radar. Sneum, on the other hand, knew the significance of both technologies, and had even given the British the name of Enrico Fermi, the Italian professor whom Bohr believed held the key to controlling such a bomb.

Sure enough, on 2 December 1942, Fermi demonstrated just how such awesome forces could be controlled. At the University of Chicago, he pulled out ZIP, a weighted safety rod, just far enough to send a nuclear pile critical, then tamed the monster he had created by pushing ZIP back into its original position. His success meant that it would be only a matter of time before the bomb was built.

If Sneum could gather so much crucial intelligence, what else could he have achieved had he not been caught in the crossfire between SOE and SIS? It was a thought-provoking question, and one I dearly wished Sneum and Turnbull to debate together. I asked Ronnie if he would be prepared to meet the spy Britain had left out in the cold, or talk to him over the phone.

‘Yes, I would,’ said Turnbull enthusiastically, to my great surprise. ‘There is a lot of interest in all this, even now. And I’d love to visit Denmark one last time before I kick the bucket.’

I put the same proposal to Tommy. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There was a time when I wanted to kill Turnbull. I don’t want to do that any more, but I don’t want to meet him, either. And why waste the price of a phone call to Brazil? I know what he did and so does he. At the very least, Turnbull chose the wrong heroes to worship. I don’t think he had very much knowledge of people’s character and ideas.’

‘You might be surprised,’ I suggested. ‘Did you know, for example, that he has admitted that his boss, Hollingworth, was more interested in quantity than quality when it came to the SOE agents they sent into Denmark?’

‘He said that?’ It was unusual to see Tommy astonished. ‘Then, for once, I agree with him. But I still don’t want to talk to him.’

At the risk of infuriating Tommy, who was by now a firm friend, I suggested that it was getting rather late in the day to be so bitter. I even dared to tell him that I liked Ronnie, as a result of the many telephone conversations we had enjoyed. There was a silence, and I feared that Tommy’s volcanic temper might erupt.

‘Unfortunately, it is true: I have felt bitter for far too long about what happened back then, and it has actually more or less destroyed my happiness in life,’ he admitted poignantly.

I never did manage to organize their reunion, and Ronnie Turnbull died shortly after his return to his native Scotland in 2005. Tommy lived on, and was no less fascinating or provocative as he neared the end of his life. Sometimes, apparently for fun, he used to make boasts about having ‘penetrated’ the British Secret Service, and waited for my reaction. Once I asked him if the British really had caught all the German spies in wartime England, as was often claimed. Tommy sat there with a fiendish smile on his face, saying nothing. The silence set my heart and mind racing, and I no longer knew if he was being playful or serious. I even revisited the evidence, and wondered whether my friend Sneum had fooled everybody, including me.

Dick White and Geoffrey Wethered of MI5 had been certain there was a traitor in London’s Danish circle, but they had never been able to find him. Tommy was investigated and cleared. I wrote to MI5 for clarification of a document they had withheld from a file relating to their investigation of Sneum in 1943. They wrote back and revealed: ‘Sneum was not in any position to leak to the Germans information regarding TABLE TOP [the SOE organization in Denmark].’ They meant that at the time of the leaks he was either in prison or under local arrest in Bedfordshire. But we know he smuggled at least one message out of prison, and his sexual prowess earned him plenty of rides to London during his so-called local arrest. So could MI5 have got it wrong?

For that to be true, R.V. Jones must also have been mistaken when dedicating Tommy’s paperback edition of
Most Secret War
to ‘one of the heroes of this book and the war.’ Could the brilliant professor’s assessment have been based on the Sneum he had known before the spy became embittered by his treatment at the hands of the British authorities? Did Tommy ultimately turn on his captors? Ralph Hollingworth seemed to think he might even have gone over to the Germans long before. Could he haen right all along?

It was all starting to play on my mind, so, making sure he wasn’t armed, I plucked up the courage to ask him straight. ‘It’s too late for anyone to do anything about this, Tommy, so perhaps you could tell me the truth, if you’ve been hiding anything up to now. Were you a double-agent?’

‘No,’ he replied, without taking any apparent offense. ‘I never told the Germans anything they didn’t know already.’

He understood why I had to ask the question. Maybe he had been suspected in some quarters all his life because he positively encouraged suspicion, perhaps to remain the center of attention. He also loved a battle of wits, especially when he knew that he alone held all the answers. Uncertainty in others seemed to amuse him.

‘You are still a mystery,’ I told him.

‘Well, I think a mystery is rather a good thing to be,’ he replied with a smile.

The British Secret Service’s refusal to release Tommy’s file only perpetuated that mystery, and we all knew time was running short. When I asked him how he wanted to be remembered, he had obviously already thought about it.

‘As a fighter,’ he said simply.

It was an apt self-portrait. Sneum fought against everyone who tried to control and tame him. That was the essence of the man. Now his fighting days were nearly over. The last time I saw him was in November 2006.

‘I feel bloody old,’ he said with a familiar throaty chuckle.

‘You’re not even ninety,’ I told him. ‘What are you moaning about? Eighty-nine is nothing these days.’

‘Shut up and pass me the whisky,’ he ordered, still smiling.

When he issued an order, it was unwise to cross him.