The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [132]
A British Army officer, no more than twenty-four and rather too proud of his pencil-thin moustache, was waiting to conduct the interrogation. He was an MI5 interrogator and he had clearly been expecting the new prisoner. The initial exchanges seemed friendly enough, if clinical and routine. Tommy willingly gave his name and rank, before being invited to tell the complicated story of his mission, from the moment he had landed in the Danish countryside. Hour after hour, he explained the difficulties he had encountered, from the misjudged parachute drop to the break-up of the Oeresund ice during his last escape. He was careful to include in his account the successes that had made his mission to Nazi-occupied Denmark worthwhile. The only questions he refused to answer concerned his contacts in the field, because he wanted to protect their identities. Rabagliati had told him before his departure that he was entitled to withhold names during any initial interrogation on his return. They would sit down together for a more detailed debrief in due course, he imagined.
Sneum’s evasive tactics didn’t seem to impress MI5. As he stubbornly resisted the pressure, the atmosphere began to change. The young officer began to focus on Tommy’s imprisonment in Sweden, and the information he had divulged there. Sneum insisted that Christophersen had told the Swedes most of those details already, but the interrogator disagreed. Sneum, it was pointed out, gave away not only his real name but the whereabouts in Copenhagen of their radio. Tommy explained the logic behind this, and emphasized that his Danish friends had designed far better radios since, therefore leaving the Germans with a misleading idea of the technology now available to the Allies. He also pointed out that he had been encouraged to cooperate to an extent, in order to secure his release.
It didn’t take very long for the young interrogator to come to the most damaging chapter of Sneum’s detention in Malmo—his threat to expose Swedish agents in Poland and Germany. ‘You were going to betray us,’ the officer suggested.
Tommy began to realize that the Swedish and Polish names he had committed to memory weren’t working solely for Sweden, but also for the Allies. Naturally, that left him with some explaining to do. ‘That was a bluff,’ he insisted. ‘I only brought that threat into play when they had kept me in jail too long.’
The interrogator shook his head. ‘From what I can see, you would quite happily have blown an entire organization. They didn’t think you were bluffing.’
Tommy smiled at this. ‘My dear fellow, that is the idea of a bluff.’
The interrogator wasn’t convinced by this defense. He also had information on Sneum’s whereabouts during the penultimate week of March, when he had stayed at the Astoria in Copenhagen. The British knew that this was a hotel frequented by German officers and Nazi sympathizers, and they didn’t buy Tommy’s claim that he had decided to hide in the last place anyone would expect him to be. Nor was Sneum very tactful when he freely admitted that he had enjoyed the company of many of these Germans, just as he had enjoyed mixing with Abwehr officers in the Hotel Cosmopolit the previous year.
Sneum explained later: ‘The Brixton interrogators said I had been trying to deliver all Britain’s secrets to the Germans. I told them they were talking nonsense, because the Danes I had contacted to set up the resistance were still working. If I had really squealed, they would have been stopped. But the English couldn’t cope with the fact that I liked some Germans.’
The young interrogator was staggered by this confession, but Tommy was determined not to sound ashamed of what he had done, and insisted that fraternizing with the enemy had paid off handsomely. He recalled: ‘I told the British this: “If you want proper information about