The Hornet's Sting (20 page)

C
OLONEL RABAGLIATI SAT DOWN with Tommy in his hotel one day and worked out a plan of action for the pilot’s return to Denmark. It would be something to hold on to during his darkest, loneliest moments as a British agent, a rulebook to be followed from the moment he first set foot on home soil. The early days would be the most dangerous. With that in mind, Tommy soon knew precisely whom he should and should not contact, and what his objectives were.

Sabotage or any open defiance of the Germans was out of the question. The Lake Tissoe plan, to pick up the twenty other Danish pilots, was similarly dismissed. The British wanted high-grade, regular intelligence about troop and ship movements, political and technological developments, defenses, changes in German officer personnel, or in the civilian attitude towards the Germans; anything, in fact, that might be useful to the Allies. Sneum was given a new series of numbered codes, pertaining to each type of ship, its class and size, to simplify the dangerous job of transmitting back to Britain when the time came. He learned them under the watchful eye of MI6 instructors, whose job it was to ensure that he committed everything to memory.

The training course was held in a mansion called the House of Anna in West Dulwich, London, a white Georgian building with a mock-Greek façade. Tommy remembered:

This simple act probably saved many lives among the British agents and commandos who were sometimes asked to pose as German soldiers on the European mainland during daring missions to infiltrate and destroy key enemy installations. Duplicates of Tommy’s German manual would have been distributed to all SIS sections as a matter of urgency. Thanks to him, German uniforms could now be copied with a precision which made a mockery of the outdated knowledge being imparted by the British intelligence specialists of the day.

Sneum reflected:

When the time came to learn the full range of coding, which was an essential part of any professional spy’s work, Sneum felt luckier. Mr Jenkins, his instructor, was a charming, elderly gentleman untroubled by ego.

The code course went well and Sneum was a model student. But, as usual, once he had worked hard, he liked to play hard. ‘As soon as we had finished I took Mr Jenkins to a pub where I knew they had bottles of cold Danish beer. It made a pleasant change from having to put ice in the warm English bitter, because that seemed to shock people. I bought every single bottle of Danish beer they had. The bar staff kept it all in the fridge for me until I was ready to drink each one. Meanwhile, Mr Jenkins told wonderful stories, full of British humour.’

But time was short. Sneum wrote in a military report later: ‘I was told that I would soon be going back to Denmark, and therefore there wasn’t enough time for me to get sufficiently educated in Morse-Coding to use a transmitter myself. And because of that, they would find a man to go with me.’ Perhaps it had always been the intention of Tommy’s SIS spymasters to partner him with a radio expert. The added advantage of a two-man team was that if Sneum were killed or captured, the radio operator could take over all intelligence-gathering duties until a replacement agent was sent. Tommy was less than thrilled with the idea of becoming part of a double-act with someone he didn’t know, but he decided to say nothing until the radio operator’s identity had been revealed to him. That way he could assess for himself the character of the man upon whose competence his life might soon depend.

As July turned into August, the emphasis of the MI6 training turned away from cerebral matters and towards ruthless action. Sneum end punishing physical training course, made no easier by the fact that Tommy’s fitness had dipped since he had left the Danish Navy. For weeks that summer he had either been sitting in confined spaces or drinking beer. But at least his insatiable appetite for women had kept him in some sort of shape. And a military man of twenty-four finds fitness easy enough to retrieve, given the right routine. Soon Tommy was running up hills and climbing ropes with the best of them, motivated by a sense of what might be waiting for him back home. He knew that his flight to England had probably made him a marked man among the pro-Nazi elements inside the Danish police. It followed that some of the most dangerous officers in the Abwehr would also be aware of his identity. If cornered, Sneum’s gift for talking his way out of trouble might take him only so far. So the British wanted to ensure that he was ready for the alternative—a fight to the death.

Tommy had been a hard individual ever since he was first encouraged to stick up for himself at the age of five. He had attended the school in Nordby where his father was headmaster. As if this wasn’t tricky enough for Tommy socially, he began his education at least a year earlier than the other local boys in his class. At six or seven, his classmates were much bigger, and ready to pick on him because of his family name. Tommy admitted: ‘At first I tried to run, and fortunately I was usually fast enough to get away. But I knew that sooner or later I would have to make a stand.’ Since his father was essentially a pacifist, it was Sneum’s grandfather, a gnarled old sailor called Thomas Sonnichsen Hansen, who helped him find the courage to fight the bullies. The advice was simple: ‘Never give in to anyone,’ Sonnichsen Hansen warned little Tommy. ‘Ever.’

Tommy, who adored his grandfather, wanted to please him, but the next time he was bullied he lost his nerve and ran away again. He recalled: ‘I felt so ashamed that I had let my grandfather down, because I loved him very much. So I found out where this bully played after school, and then I went there, attacked him with a stick and beat him almost to a pulp.’

From those crude beginnings, he had learned other ways to hurt people and defend himself, and built a fearsome reputation for someone of his modest build. He had boxed in the Danish Navy and fought like a tiger when pushed, as Kjeld Pedersen could testify. So Tommy thought he knew enough to get the better of most adversaries already, but the SIS hand-to-hand combat course gave his self-defense a new dimension. He was familiar with some of the throws and moves from his naval training, including the correct hold and procedure for snapping a man’s neck. But the MI6 instructors opened up a new world of pressure points and seemingly effortless moves which could incapacitate or kill an opponent.

Once, when Tommy had imbibed perhaps a little too much schnapps, he told the author: ‘There is a gap between the cranium and the jawbone, behind each ear lobe. I was taught how to exploit those pressure points with a firm push of the thumbs. I’ll show you if you like.’ It was the second time he had offered to kill me, and for the second time I politely declined. Anyone who met Thomas Sneum knew immediately that he was not a man to be crossed. He had possessed a ruthless streak since childhood, for instance learning at the age of ten a particularly shocking way to kill ducks: ‘You can wring a duck’s neck, but it takes quite a lot of energy, and isn’t a very efficient way to kill. A quick bite into the duck’s skull did the job with the minimum of fuss. With practice, you can crush the skull with your teeth without getting anything in your mouth at all.’

The education Tommy received on the MI6 course seemed to be no more than an extension of the principles of killing he had learned as a boy: namely, attack the weak point with maximum force and a minimum exertion of energy. Armed with his new arsenal of lethal British tips, he knew would be able to dispatch any adversary quickly and silently back in Denmark.

Even so, Sneum’s chances of survival as a spy in Nazi-occupied Europe would depend heavily on the calibre of the man chosen to go with him. Given that MI6 had told Tommy there wasn’t enough time to get his Morse code fully up to speed, it took them what seemed like an age to come up with the ‘expert’ who was supposed to send his messages for him. In his military report of his summer in England, Sneum wrote: ‘It looked as though it was even harder than they had thought to find a man for me. In the end, they chose Sigfred Christophersen, but he also needed some training. So it all took such a long time that I could have learned [Morse code] for myself.’

When Tommy was introduced to his wireless operator and partner for the mission, he was sceptical. Sigfred Johannes Christophersen, who had celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday on 11 June, was so tall and lean that he stood out from the crowd. Tommy was concerned that Sigfred’s build might make him too easily identifiable for covert operations, but there was something else about him, too. It was as though Christophersen hadn’t begun to prepare himself mentally for the enormity of what they were about to do. Also, there was no natural affinity between the two men.

SIS hadn’t foreseen any potential problems between the pair. They were both young, enthusiastic and seemingly courageous; and their pasts pointed to similar ambitions. Handsome and hitherto adventurous, Sigfred’s story was almost as dramatic as Sneum’s, despite unremarkable beginnings. He had joined the Royal Lifeguard Regiment in November 1935 but found army life too mundane. So he applied to the Flying School in Vaerloese, where he enrolled on 1 April 1937. All went well until the following year, when his superiors noticed that he had started to cut corners and no longer flew according to the rulebook. Deemed a liability, he was thrown out of the school on 10 September 1938, his military career in tatters. After six months’ unemployment, he went to Germany and found work as a gardener. But he spotted a way to beat the boredom in the middle of January 1940, when he volunteered to become a pilot in the Finno-Russian War. For the next ten weeks he flew for the Finns, although Sneum later insisted that Christophersen had never been involved in any kind of aerial combat during that period. The brief and bloody conflict was over by the end of March 1940, and for Sigfred that signalled another downturn in his fortunes.

He returned to Denmark, only to face a fresh period of unemployment, this time caused by the German invasion. Increasingly desperate, he worked that summer under the occupiers back at Vaerloese airfield. But his conscience was clearly nagging away at him. In mid-October he and two comrades quit their jobs and came up with a brilliant plan to travel to England and serve with the RAF. The trio obtained visas to travel to Turkey on the pretext of buying tobacco there. Five days later, to their own astonishment, they were in Istanbul. Instead of seeking out tobacco merchants, though, they reported directly to the British Air Attaché and volunteered for the RAF. The Air Attaché welcomed the offer and gave the Danes some money for food and lodgings. They were instructed to remain in Istanbul and await further orders. Their patience paid off when, on 10 February 1941, they were told to board a ship. It took them south to the Cape of Good Hope and all theway back north to England, where they arrived on 23 April 1941. Their story was checked at the Royal Patriotic School, just as Sneum’s would be two months later.