The Hornet's Sting (46 page)

Tommy recalled: ‘Gregory told me: “Watch your back if you get out. There are people who want to liquidate you.” He had risked his career to come and see me, but if someone threatened his friends he would do anything to stop them. He wasn’t a big man but he was a man of courage. He was probably the best friend I ever had in England.’

Back in Copenhagen, it was Christian Michael Rottboell’s radio operators who needed to watch their backs as the Germans closed in for the kill. On the night of 4 September 1942, the Abwehr sealed off the entire area around 8 Vinkelager, where Paul Johannesen, one such radio operator, was transmitting to Britain. As the house was stormed, Danish police were ordered into the front line, but the Abwehr’s Alsatian dogs alerted Johannesen to his imminent capture. He had time to pick up a pistol and open fire as the door flew open. A Danish policeman named Ostergaard Nielsen was killed and several others were wounded. Tragically, Nielsen was himself a member of the Danish resistance, but he had found no way to avoid carrying out German orders on that particular night.

Seeing himself hopelessly outnumbered, Johannesen shouted, ‘You won’t get me alive.’ Then he ran into another room and swallowed his ‘L’ pill, supplied by SOE in London. As the cyanide went to work on his body, Johannesen screamed, ‘Forgive me,’ and died in agony. It is not known whether he was talking to God or trying to apologize to his colleagues for the incriminating evidence he had left in the flat. On a blank page of a notebook, the Germans found the distinguishable imprint of an address. It threatened to lead the Nazis to SOE’s leader in Denmark, Christian Michael Rottboell.

At the time, though, it appeared that MogenHammer was in most immediate danger of capture by the Germans, so he was ordered out of the country. When he initially refused to go, his spymaster in London, Ralph Hollingworth, expressed the hope that he would soon see sense. Then he added ruthlessly: ‘but if a man becomes a real danger . . . he should be liquidated.’ Fortunately for Hammer, he saw the light just in time, and escaped to Sweden by kayak.

Whether Hollingworth’s ruthlessness would prove terminal for his least favorite agent, Thomas Sneum of the rival SIS, remained uncertain. That seemed to depend on how effectively Hollingworth could persuade others to share his view that Tommy was a traitor. While he attempted to do so, he seems to have kept everyone else in SOE’s Danish Section, even his second-in-command Reginald Spink, in the dark over Sneum’s imprisonment. Spink gave his version of events years later: ‘For some strange reason, which never became evident to us in SOE, Sneum was put straight into jail on his return to England. We were told about Sneum’s arrest by Christmas Moeller, who had come to England on SOE’s request, and to whom Sneum had demanded to talk.’

It was early September when Spink reported Christmas Moeller’s revelations to Hollingworth, who appears to have feigned ignorance before telling his sidekick to contact Commander Senter if he was concerned. So it was that a bout of sanity at last broke out in the interdepartmental war between SIS and SOE. Spink simply wanted to ensure that justice had been done, even if the endangered agent had belonged to the rival SIS, so he did indeed go and see John Senter, the head of SOE’s Security Section. Senter had been a barrister during peacetime, and soon agreed that a qualified lawyer should visit Sneum to assess his case. Since this might turn into a trial of sorts, he put forward a man who was well equipped for the task.

Flight Lieutenant Hugh Park had also been a peacetime barrister, and a good one at that. Much later in the century, he would become a judge, and then a knight of the realm. In the early 1980s, following the occupation of the Iranian Embassy in London, which was famously broken by an SAS raid captured live on television, Park sat in judgement upon the few terrorist survivors. Back in 1942, however, he was only thirty-two, and a new recruit to the General Section of SOE, which came under the umbrella of Senter’s Security Section. Park, like Senter, used his natural talent for cross-examination to help Special Section, which dealt with counter-espionage. Their job was to detect any ‘turned’ SOE agents as they arrived back in Britain. Now Senter ordered Park to concern himself with the complex case of Thomas Sneum, and dispatched him to Brixton along with Spink, so that they could make a joint assessment of the spy. Park and Spink made a good double act. The former was a highly qualified interrogator; the latter an expert on Denmark. Together they would form a small but formidable jury.

It was Spink’s first and last experience of prison. He felt nervous as he was driven through the huge gate and found himself inside Brixton’s high and threatening walls. Instead of being taken to Sneum’s cell, Reggie and Park were invited to wait in a reception room near Governor Benke’s office. The prisoner was brought into these more spacious surroundings and, after brief and formal introductions, the process began. Tommy was disappointed that his visitors were neither friends nor the SIS spymasters who might have been able to order his release that very day. Nevertheless, he sensed that the meeting must be important, and initial signs were encouraging. These men didn’t display the arrogance, ignorance and mental cruelty of his quainterrogators. They were patient and interested in what he had to say.

Sneum was sure he had heard Christmas Moeller speak favorably of Spink, and the Free Danish leader seemed to have assessed this particular Englishman’s personality correctly. Here, at last, was someone who listened. Although Sneum had told his story countless times already, he soon noticed a difference in his own delivery. With such a receptive audience, he was able to convey the pressures he had been under and the practical problems he had encountered far more calmly.

Spink knew Denmark intimately, having been an adviser to the British Legation in Copenhagen until the occupation: he spoke the language, knew the current conditions and understood the people. He wasn’t even shocked to hear that Sneum had socialized with Germans, knowing only too well that nothing could be achieved without some sort of contact with the enemy. Park also displayed a keen interest in Denmark, a country he would visit at the end of the war in a successful bid to recover missing SOE money. But his enquiries were more pointed than Spink’s, and he posed some tough questions on the controversial topic of Sneum’s behavior in Sweden. Tommy invited his latest jury to step into his shoes: at best he had felt neglected by the British and at worst double-crossed. In those desperate circumstances, he had chosen to protect himself from the threat of being returned to the Germans. Yes, he had played a dirty game in Malmo and had probably gone too far. Ultimately, however, he insisted he had betrayed no one. Moreover, his achievements had been considerable, given all the infighting which had marred his mission. He had left behind the foundations of an effective resistance network, one which didn’t rely upon the Princes of Danish Intelligence. He had also made the first inroads into areas of scientific intelligence which others seemed unable to grasp. As for the accusation that he was pro-German, Sneum explained that he simply saw Germans as human beings too. If this was a crime, he was guilty. Yes, he had been ruthless and headstrong in Copenhagen at times, but he had recruited good men to the Allied cause. Indeed, the men who remained operational in Copenhagen would provide the biggest testament to his loyalty at the end of the war.

Spink and Park listened carefully for three hours. They had been given reports from other men who featured in Sneum’s story, disgruntled characters who told a very different, damning tale. Presumably they would also have known all about the claim that there was a traitor operating within Danish circles in London. Could that traitor be Sneum? Or could Sneum be feeding this German spy information for use against those SOE agents who had stolen his thunder on the Danish stage? They put their questions to Sneum calmly. Sneum insisted he knew nothing about such a traitor.

But where did the truth lie? Spink and Park left Brixton to consider all they had been told in more comfortable surroundings. With minimum disagreement, they compiled a joint report for the attention of their respective SOE superiors. Unusually, their findings remained entirely free of political or departmental bias. On the basis of their objective understanding of what had happened to Thomas Sneum over the previous year, they offered a series of nononsense recommendations. If their SOE bosses were prepared to follow their suggestions, there would soon be liaison with SIS too, in order to determine Sneum’s fate.

Since their falling-out in June 1941 over the lack of space in the Hornet Moth, the war had taken Thomas Sneum and Christian Michael Rottboell on very different paths. However, thei stories had also displayed a certain continuity. Sneum had been an agent for SIS in Denmark and had then found himself imprisoned in Sweden for his efforts. While he was adapting to life in a Malmo cell, Rottboell, the SOE agent, had landed in Denmark and taken over British interests there. Christian Michael had then organized the escape to England of Christmas Moeller, whose subsequent support for Sneum had undoubtedly helped him survive.

The hangman’s noose remained a threat to Sneum for as long as he was left in Brixton, but Rottboell’s situation suddenly became even more critical on the night of 25 September 1942 in Copenhagen. Unbeknown to Christian Michael, seven Danish policemen, acting on German orders, had surrounded his headquarters at 29 Oeresundgade. As they stormed the hideout, it might have crossed Rottboell’s mind to surrender quietly. After all, the Princes had recently brokered an agreement with the Danish police to guarantee that any captured resistance men would be imprisoned in Denmark and not sent to the Gestapo in Germany. Several key Danish policemen had even claimed they were willing to stand up to the Germans in order to ensure that the agreement was honored.

Unfortunately, in the panic at Oeresundgade, Rottboell didn’t stop to weigh up his chances of remaining free from the clutches of German torturers. Instinctively, he grabbed a pistol as the Danish police stormed through his door. Seemingly caught in two minds as his hands were quickly thrust behind his back, Rottboell neither opened fire nor released his grip on the weapon. Somehow, the gun went off accidentally in the struggle and then fell to the floor. As with the Johannesen raid earlier that month, a Danish policeman was hit in the commotion. This time the officer, Inspector A. F. Ost, miraculously escaped injury, because the bullet bounced off his belt buckle. Christian Michael wasn’t so lucky. Seeing a shell hit their colleague’s midriff, other policemen opened fire with machinepistols, some before they had time to realize that Rottboell had now been disarmed. For one accidental bullet, Rottboell’s own body was riddled with twelve. He died instantly.

Duus Hansen knew that Rottboell had been working around the clock since Johannesen’s death just to keep the resistance alive. He wrote later: ‘The whole organization had to be changed because we thought that old contacts might now have been known to the Germans. This work took so much out of Rottboell, who saw it as his duty to ensure the safety of others, that he didn’t have time to address the question of his own protection and security.’