The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [134]
Ironically, however, Tommy’s information about German efforts to make an atom bomb were already out of date. In autumn 1941 the Allies and Germany had both come to a crossroads in their respective nuclear-fission programs. But during the first half of 1942 the Allies had forged ahead in the race, while the Nazis, and in particular the new Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Albert Speer, had recently been advised by Professor Heisenberg that such a weapon could not be built in time to make a difference to the war.
If the British knew that the Germans had scaled down their efforts, it might even have sounded to them as though Tommy had been ‘turned’ and that he was trying to strengthen the Nazis’ bargaining position should they ever need to sue for peace. To those in Britain who knew nothing about the potential for an atom bomb, however, Sneum’s claims would have sounded staggering in their gravity, especially his first radio communication to that effect, sent in partnership with Duus Hansen from Denmark in January 1942. As an old man, Tommy alleged: ‘Otto Gregory told me that when he talked to his superiors at the Air Ministry about my atom-bomb intelligence, they said it was the biggest and most important news they ever got.’
Whatever the truth about the way in which the British intelligence community greeted and assessed Sneum’s claims, the sensitivity of the issue meant it was safer to keep him under lock and key. Tommy was a one-off, very hard to read, and the pressure from his interrogators as they tried to break him down was sustained and unpleasant. The faces sometimes changed, but the questions remained the same. Sneum was interviewed for at least ten hours on that first day, with several intelligence officers working in shifts. On the second day, the process started all over again, and lasted from morning until evening. The third day brought the same exhausting routine as he was subjected to more verbal abuse from eager young British officers.
‘I was interrogated by God-knows-how-many different British intelligence people,’ he said. ‘The questioning was relentless.’
They had clearly been well briefed on the situation in Denmark, but seemed to have no idea about the harsh realities of an agent’s struggle to survive. Time and again the interrogators returned to what they knew for sure—that Sneum had threatened to expose Swedish spies in Nazi-occupied Europe. They rejected his insistence that he was fundamentally loyal to the Allied cause and had been forced to fight dirty, simply regarding his tactics as outright treachery.
Tommy wondered when the British people who knew him best—Rabagliati, Gregory and Jones—might walk through the door to call off the dogs, as had happened the previous June. This summer, however, there was no respite and the questions kept coming as the days rolled by. With each interrogation, MI5 seemed to demand ever more detail, as though Tommy should be able to remember absolutely everything he had done, on each individual day, for seven months. It seemed as though the British were trying to catch him out at every turn. If he gave a solid account of an event to one interrogator, it was seized upon and used against him by the next. At the height of summer, with little food or water, this relentless pressure was exhausting. Sneum felt as though he were edging along a high wire, with the British determined to make him trip and fall. He was numb with fatigue and confusion.
After a week, the interrogators, sensing that he might be at his most vulnerable, finally took Tommy to a larger cell, where he was reunited with Arne Helvard. As soon as they were left alone with coffee and cigarettes, both men began to look for a microphone. ‘I found one up in a grille in the corner and smashed it,’ Tommy admitted. It was time to let off some steam about their incarceration, and they insulted the British in every way they knew. Tommy revealed later: ‘We talked about