The Hornet's Sting (21 page)

By the time the British were satisfied, however, Christophersen had heard alarming stories about the mortality rates among pilots in the Battle of Britain. He was therefore more than happy to accept an approach from British Intelligence, who trained him in radio-telegraphy. The course intensified when he was earmarked to accompany Sneum back into Denmark.

One of Christophersen’s colleagues on the journey from Turkey had been Jorgen Thalbitzer. He went through with the original plan and signed up for the RAF. Later, he was shot down over France and imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, from which he subsequently made a spectacular escape.

Sneum met Thalbitzer in the summer of 1941, before the latter’s heroics, and the pair got on well. He was less enthusiastic about Christophersen, but he hoped that this opinion would change once they got to know each other better. Perhaps in a bid to achieve some bonding, SIS moved the taller man to the Ebury Court Hotel, but this only exacerbated the tension. By the time the pair were moved into a rented flat at 206 Rodney House, Dolphin Square, it was time for some straight talking. One night after dinner and several beers, Sneum asked his partner why he wanted to leave England so soon after arriving.

‘It’s too dangerous to stay here and join the RAF,’ explained Sigfred. ‘Have you heard how many pilots are being killed? It’s too risky.’

‘What we’re going to be doing is a hell of a lot more dangerous than joining the RAF,’ Sneum told him. ‘Do you know what it’ll be like for us if we get caught?’

‘I’m not worried about that,’ Christophersen said dismissively.

Tommy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You’re not worried about being tortured or shot?’

‘We don’t have to let it get to that, do we?’ Sneum was speechless, so Sigfred filled the silence. ‘I’m in no hurry to die. I’ll do my bit, and a lot more. But if we get compromised, I want to survive.’

Tommy was stunned, and as he said later: ‘From that moment I considered him to be a danger to the mission, a threat to my safety, and a coward. We all had fears and doubts about how we would react when faced with torture. But you had to suppress those feelings.’

As a two-man team, Tommy and Christophersen were supposed to be ready to protect each other to the death on their return to Nazi-occupied Denmark. Yet here was a man who seemed to be implying that he would rather tell the Germans everything than face an unpleasant ordeal. As far as Sneum was concerned, Sigfred might as well have admitted on the spot that he would sell Tommy’s life in exchange for his own. Sneum got up and walked out.

T
HOMAS SNEUM CONFRONTED Colonel Rabagliati at the first opportunity. He couldn’t understand how someone like Christophersen had got this far in the selection process. Later Tommy phasized: ‘By now I was completely opposed to using him, and I told the colonel that. I said, “He is afraid, he has warned me that he is only going back to Denmark because he believes it is certain death to stay in England, and he will tell the Germans everything if they get hold of him.”’

Rabagliati seemed to think Sneum was exaggerating his concerns, because he replied simply: ‘We haven’t got anyone else. You’ll have to use him.’

Tommy replied: ‘I can find you a number of better people you could use.’

But the spymaster wasn’t having it. ‘They must be trained here,’ he insisted.

With a tinge of bitterness, Sneum reflected later: ‘They thought if you hadn’t been trained in England, you couldn’t put your hand on a Morse code key.’

The policy would change later in the war, partly because of what later happened to Tommy. It was a security safeguard which had been put in place to prevent the Abwehr from using their own operators to send false messages, having tortured the relevant codes out of captured agents. SOE in Holland was destroyed through such German tactics, with nearly all the British-run spies eventually shot. So it was no wonder that SIS was keen to keep as much control as it could over radio communications.

‘It has to be that way,’ said Rabagliati. ‘The operators here need to know the personal Morse style of the sender to be sure that he’s genuine. They know Christophersen’s Morse hand now. It’s as simple as that. He’ll have to go with you.’

This logic still seemed like nonsense to Tommy. The personnel receiving the messages back in England were subject to such a rapid turnover that, within a few months, Sneum predicted that no one would be left who had even heard of Christophersen, let alone studied his Morse hand during training.

Looking back, Tommy attributed Rabagliati’s final decision to go with Christophersen no matter what the risks to the in-fighting between Britain’s covert services: ‘SOE was also trying to go into Denmark, and there was competition between them and SIS to see who could send the first team in. Personal pride came before the cause.’ According to some accounts, SOE were already angling to take over
all
covert operations in Denmark. And with Sir Charles Hambro as a personal supporter, there could be little doubt that Commander Ralph Hollingworth, the rising star of SOE’s Danish Section, had a powerful ally where it mattered. For the SIS to be outmanoeuvred in this way by the SOE ‘amateurs’ would have seemed unthinkable to the long-standing professionals at 54 Broadway. And Colonel Euan Rabagliati especially was not a man who liked to come second.

However, none of these political factors were known to Sneum on that August morning in 1941. In fact, he still didn’t even know the name of the organization that had recruited him. All he knew for sure was that he was being sent into Nazi-occupied territory with a man he didn’t like or trust.

About two weeks before radio instruction was due to be completed, Charles Seymour, Rabagliati’s number two, arrived at Rodney House unexpectedly. He told Sneum and Sigfred to pack four days’ worth of kit. Seymour, who had left a job in the tobacco trade in China to serve his country, was a good-natured twentyseven-year-old with precious little miary experience. He had been brought into SIS by Claude Dansey because his mother spoke fluent Dutch and because he had the right family credentials. At that time he had been known by his real name, Dudley Overton Seymour. He had spent precisely one day in the Tank Corps before his sudden recruitment by MI6 and had mixed feelings about the switch: he had crossed the globe to fight for Britain, and this clandestine organizational work didn’t sound like fighting at all. So it was a reluctant Captain Seymour who joined the Broadway team at the start of 1941, as Rabagliati’s assistant in the nerve center of British Intelligence.

Almost immediately he was invited to change his name; not by MI6, but by a secretary who worked inside its headquarters. At twenty-one, Hazel Wonnacott had already been out with a man named Dudley, and she didn’t have fond memories of the affair.

‘So what do you want to call me?’ Seymour wasn’t about to let his name spoil a chance of romance.

‘Charles. Yes, Charlie, that’ll do,’ said Hazel.

The name stuck for the rest of his life. By the late summer of 1941, Charles Seymour and Hazel Wonnacott were engaged to be married, with the date set for 6 September. Although the wedding was only days away, Seymour still had to concentrate on his job.

Charlie was more comfortable with the Dutch side of the A2 operation, but his duties naturally extended to Denmark. So here he was, ready to drive Britain’s first two Danish agents out of London in the direction of Manchester. They jumped into the sports car Rabagliati had lent Seymour especially for the task, and sped up to their new base for parachute training—Ringway Airport in Wilmslow. Tommy broke into a wry smile years later when he thought about the inconvenient location. ‘It all had to be done in the most difficult and expensive way, otherwise it was no good,’ he suggested dryly.

First came the preparatory phase of their training, when the agents were protected by a harness. Before their technique had become adequate, however, it was time for the real thing. Over the next four days, they parachuted day and night. Sneum recalled: ‘You had to do six jumps to get a certificate, although what use that piece of paper could have been to us where we were going was anyone’s guess. Then we had to do a couple of jumps from low altitude. I did at least ten jumps that week.’

Night jumps from low heights were the most treacherous. Tommy would still be adapting his eyes to the darkness when he was jerked upwards by the sudden opening of his parachute; and he would barely have recovered before colliding with the ground below. ‘How I didn’t break my legs on that first night of jumping, I’ll never know,’ he said.

In the final twenty-four hours of the course they made three jumps, the last one at night. Due to high winds, the SIS team was advised not to jump, but an uncomfortable Seymour explained that they had to, since there was no more time in which to complete the course. In the murky light, Sneum’s parachute opened late and the ground arrived early. He hit at force, which stunned him temporarily, and he didn’t react quickly enough to what happened next. Before he knew it, the wind had dragged him across the field. ‘I was being scraped and bumped along the ground at speed, face down,’ he remembered. ‘I couldn’t seem to free myself from the harness.’ When he finally managed to do so, he sat in a dazed heap, cursing Seymour for ignoring the warnings. Sneum was now going into Denmark with a brn nose and conspicuous cuts and bruises. ‘It was a bit stupid of them to send me to Denmark a few days after I’d smashed up my face,’ he reflected.

It was the first week of September when the SIS mission to Denmark received its final green light. MI6 was about to join the war in Denmark. Seymour celebrated by tying the knot with Hazel in Exeter Cathedral, then SIS allowed the newly-weds a five-day honeymoon in the charming Cornish fishing village of Mullion.

Back in London, Sneum and Christophersen were ordered to rip all conspicuous labels off their clothes, and were given a little Swedish and Danish money. The problem was that Danish cash was particularly hard to come by, and when the time came the British had only a single five-hundred-krone note to hand over to their spies. For some reason, it was given to Christophersen, but Tommy decided not to protest. He already had a bad feeling about the mission, so one more piece of stupidity didn’t seem to make much difference.

On 9 September 1941, Sneum and Christophersen were put on to a Whitley bomber at a small airfield outside Newmarket, Suffolk, and flown across the North Sea into Danish airspace. Their parachute drop was delayed by thick cloud, and confusion reigned in the cockpit over their precise location. But a difficult flight was about to get worse. Tommy recalled: ‘Suddenly we saw tracer fire coming straight up at us, and it looked as if it was going to score a direct hit. The flak was uncomfortably heavy.’

The British crew didn’t take long to decide they had to turn back. But no one realized just how close the flak had come to taking their lives until they examined the aircraft, after landing back in Newmarket. Sneum remembered: ‘The fuselage was peppered with holes: we counted thirty-seven. We had been lucky and the pilot was surprised at how much damage there was.’ The night’s trauma had been for nothing, but at least they were still alive.

The weather forecast was so bad the following day that they didn’t even try to reach Denmark. Rabagliati could see how wound up Tommy had become, so he took him out for a drive through some of Suffolk’s country lanes in his Bentley.

‘I want to show you a little trick I learned from my racing days,’ he said. ‘If you survive the war, you might be able to use it. Good pilots are often good drivers. Do you like fast cars?’