The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [133]
The interrogator seemed far from satisfied and the exchanges became more heated. Tommy accused the young officer of being naïve, and he attacked the British for their xenophobia. ‘I think the majority of regular German Army people are decent and well disciplined. Most are also against Hitler,’ he dared to suggest.
‘If you regard the Germans so highly, why didn’t you stay over there with them?’ came the reply.
‘What do you actually know about Germany?’ Tommy fired back accusingly. ‘Did you get good information or not?’
To the interrogator’s ears, Tommy was sounding ever more like a collaborator or, worse still, a double-agent. So the British officer voiced a theory that the Princes had shared for some time: that Sneum couldn’t have escaped from Denmark in the Hornet Moth the previous summer without German help. Tommy pointed out that, were he really a double-agent, he would hardly have warned the British about the claims of a drunken Abwehr officer, who had boasted that the Germans still had an effective spy ring in Britain, and received ‘running information’ from it.
But since Sneum wasn’t more specific, this did little to strengthen his case, because the British had more substantial allegations against him, from his very own spy partner. Christophersen had already accused Tommy of inventing the radio message ordering him over to Sweden, the one that had effectively sent Thorbjoern Christophersen and Kaj Oxlund to their deaths. Astonishingly, Sneum freely admitted that he had done just that.
‘I told the British what I had done when they interrogated me,’ he confirmed later. ‘I said that Christophersen was my radio operator, and I had the right to get rid of him if he wasn’t doing his job. It had been the only way I could get him out without killing him. I had tried to solve the problem quietly.’ On this point, at least, the British seemed to accept Tommy’s reasoning, as he revealed: ‘After that the British never bothered me about it.’
One problem for Sneum was his refusal to come up with the names of people who could support his story about Christophersen’s loss of nerve, or indeed Tommy’s own loyalty to the British cause. He had decided to protect the identity of Duus Hansen, for example, who had gently sided with Sneum in his dispute with Christophersen. Indeed, until he could talk to someone he knew he could trust, he was determined that the identities of all of those who had given him assistance in Denmark would remain secret.
He demanded to see either Colonel Ramsden or Otto Gregory, and asked for a message to be sent to R.V. Jones, the scientific expert. When he received no satisfactory response, he played what he thought was his strongest card: namely, that he had important information about a German bomb that might soon be powerful enough to blow up the whole of south-east England. ‘I told them I didn’t want the Germans to win the war because of this bomb. I suggested that the British make one themselves or steal one from the Germans.’
This seemingly outlandish claim about a super-bomb was met with derision, probably because the young interrogator was far too junior to have heard about the potential for such a development. But the warning was doubtless passed up the intelligence line for further analysis, where it would have been treated much more seriously. Indeed, when Tommy tried to raise the subject again during a subsequent interrogation, he was told urgently: ‘Forget about it! Shut up!’
Tommy observed later:
Hardly anyone knew that the potential for such a bomb existed, and the importance of Enrico Fermi—maybe twenty people in the whole of Britain. And there was little old me, just a flight lieutenant, saying it. Just mentioning Fermi’s name or talking about the bomb was probably enough