The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [118]
Tommy, though, had been more preoccupied with the risks involved in placing his future in the hands of the Swedish authorities. He had sought a final assurance from the Princes that he wouldn’t be left to rot in a Swedish jail. Later he remembered: ‘I received that guarantee and told Arne Helvard it was time to get across if he was coming. He said he was.’ But Sneum was still sufficiently worried about the fate which awaited them on the other side of the border to request a final conference that morning with Niels-Richard Bertelsen, who took a chance by visiting Tommy’s last Copenhagen lair in an unmarked police car.
‘There’s going to be a problem with the Swedes, Niels-Richard,’ Tommy said. ‘I just know it. I’ve never trusted them.’
His brother-in-law didn’t see how he could help, and reminded Sneum that the best way to steer clear of trouble was to avoid capture. But Tommy suggested that Bertelsen could influence events as a last resort. He told the policeman how, before Christmas, he had stumbled across the names of some Swedish agents operating in Poland and Berlin. ‘I’m going to give them to you,’ he said. ‘If I do get caught over there, and they lock me up for longer than Lunding says they will, you can threaten to give the names of their agents to the Germans. If you don’t get a postcard from Stockholm by the start of June, with a code word to confirm my freedom, and you know I didn’t freeze to death on the ice, then you’ll also know they’ve locked me up and thrown away the key. So you send an anonymous letter to the Swedish Legation in Copenhagen, warning that their spy ring is about to be blown because of what they’ve done to me. You tell them another letter has been put away for safe keeping with all the relevant information on their spies in the east, and that letter will be handed over to the Germans if I’m not released immediately. That’ll make them think twice. I’ll be out in no time.’
‘I don’t think I could do that,’ said Bertelsen, looking horrified. ‘It’s madness.’
‘Take these names anyway,’ Sneum told the policeman, handing him a piece of paper. ‘Keep them and hide them, and only use them if you think it is absolutely necessary. There are twelve names on the list. For every genuine name of an agent, two on the list are false.’
Later Sneum explained his ruthless logic:
I gave my brother-in-law a number of names of personnel who didn’t exist, so the Germans would never be sure who was real and who wasn’t. They would have a hell of a lot of work to do to clear up the mess, if it came to that. But I felt pretty sure that the Swedes would back down.
Spying is a dirty game and at that point I thought that if the Swedes played dirty, then I was prepared to fight dirty. I didn’t have a high opinion of the Swedes and I believed that the work I was doing was more important. I didn’t think anyone in Germany could get any decent information out anyway, because a transmitter wouldn’t have lasted five minutes there before it was discovered.
From my point of view, I just wanted to have something in reserve if it all went wrong for me in Sweden. I wanted to know in my own mind that I hadn’t used all my ammunition already; that there was something still in reserve. And if these agents were so important, then the Swedes wouldn’t risk compromising them by detaining me.
Bertelsen listened to Tommy’s explanation on that tense day in March 1942 and shook his head. ‘I think you’ve forgotten who your true enemy is,’ he observed sadly.
‘Right now,’ Tommy replied bitterly, ‘it feels like almost everybody.’
It wasn’t true, of course, because, even under the most mindbending pressure, Sneum had already shown that he could think of resistance men such as Duus Hansen, Olsen and the unknown parachutist before he concentrated on trying to save his own life. He still