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‘Did you get anything better than stamps?’ asked Tommy with a smile.

‘Yes, a lot of money,’ claimed Bill. ‘Trouble was, they caught me.’

As they took a stroll and engaged in small-talk, Sneum’s mind was racing. ‘Could I give you a telephone number?’ The question was sudden and desperate considering they barely knew each other.

‘You can if she’s pretty,’ laughed Bill.

‘I mean for someone who might help get me out of here too.’

Sneum explained that the next time they saw each other, he would have the number of a man named Otto Gregory ready for Bill, scribbled on a small piece of paper. Somehow the number, for the RAC Club in London, had stuck in his mind since the previous summer.

Bill looked worried, so Tommy gave him an alternative—to pass the number to another Dane who was still in the prison but likely to get out soon—Arne Helvard.

Their conversation was suddenly cut short by the warder: ‘Right, that’s enough, you two! Sneum, back to your cell.’

But at least Tommy now had new hope.

For a few anxious days, Bill was nowhere to be seen. Then one morning Sneum spotted him leaving the exercise yard, and managed to slip him a tiny scrap of paper with the information he would need. Tommy felt strangely elated. No one could keep him down for long, he told himself. The Germans hadn’t managed it when they invaded his country, and the British who had stabbed him in the back wouldn’t manage it either. But he never saw Bill again.

Arne Helvard was freed in mid-July, at about the same time that the Free Danish leader, John Christmas Moeller, learned of Thomas Sneum’s imprisonment in Brixton. Even before Helvard reached him with the news, Christmas Moeller might have been tipped off by Frank Stagg, a pro-Danish member of the Special Operations Executive. Stagg, a naval commander, had joined SOE in the autumn of 1940 as principal assistant to Harry Sporborg, then head of the Scandinavian Section. By the summer of 1942 he had climbed sufficiently high in the SOE hierarchy to be privy to information regarding Sneum’s incarceration, and he was not afraid to speak his mind. Just as Helvard was being released, Stagg hosted a dinner for Christmas Moeller and other friends of the Danish cause at the Thatched House Club in west London. At that event it seems likely that the SOE man expressed similar views to those he would later put in writing: ‘The treatment of Sneum on his return to London in 1942 was a disgraceful chapter in the English handling of one who had given us what radar specialists described as “the most valuable piece of radar intelligence yet received”—and the damnable handling also went over to his companion in flight, Helvard.’

Stagg and Christmas Moeller decided to campaign on Sneum’s behalf, even if it made them unpopular. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Stagg left SOE later that month, at the height of the controversy over Sneum. His records are said by the Foreign Office to give no official reason for his departure, although Ralph Hollingworth, the London-based head of SOE Denmark, described Stagg at around this time as ‘irresponsible and erratic.’ Maybe Hollingworth meant that Stagg had decided to speak out about Britain’s treatment of Sneum, against SOE wishes.

As Free Danish leader, Christmas Moeller was appalled that he had been kept in the dark about Sneum’s imprisonment. Neither, he soon discovered, had he been informed of other key SOE developments, which he knew would have a vital bearing on the situation back home. For instance, no one had told him of a proposed meeting in Stockholm between Captain Volle Gyth of Danish Intelligence and Ronnie Turnbull, or the preparations for the dropping of a fresh wave of SOE agents into Denmark. Incensed, Christmas Moeller decided to hit back. He demanded that Mogens Hammer, codenamed ‘Arthur’, must be contacted in the field and told that Moeller had severed his SOE links. Moeller’s letter was dated 19 July 1942:

Dear Commander Hollingworth,

I am writing this letter