The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [148]
Wethered also describes Hollingworth’s suspicions with regard to the Princes, also known as the HAMILCAR organization:
They are opposed to acts of sabotage arranged in their country, in case these might spoil their plans of seizing power from the Germans ultimately, and SOE have noticed that information which should reach them through HAMILCAR about sabotage seems sometimes to have been suppressed . . .
An additional point about the HAMILCAR organization it that although it does a good deal of ship watching on the Danish coast for its own purposes, information about this is not passed to SOE, but is suppressed—presumably for the same reason as sabotage information is suppressed.
By now, almost two years had passed since the Princes had ‘missed’ the breakout by the Bismarck, but clearly they were still up to their old tricks, judging by these remarks. It seems that by the spring of 1943, both MI5 and SOE felt that no Dane could be fully trusted. One man was more guilty than the rest, however—the mystery spy who had fed German Intelligence and then disappeared.
Wethered could not rest until he had that traitor in his sights. At some point over the next month, he or a member of his investigation team visited Sneum in Milton Ernest to interrogate him. They suspected he was the traitor and said so. Sneum pointed to the facts. He had been in prison in Brixton throughout the summer of 1942, and effectively under local arrest in Milton Ernest ever since. How could he have known anything? And even if he had been given any information about Danish operations, how could he have passed that intelligence on to the Germans?
Given the earlier warning he had received from Otto Gregory—that there were people in London who wanted him liquidated—the latest accusations spelled grave danger for Tommy. He was living in an isolated place, so he decided it would make sense from that point on to make sure civilians were never far away from him. He claimed: ‘Even in Bedfordshire it began to feel like I was always under threat of death. I had those bastards coming out to the farm but they couldn’t kill me openly.’
Where Wethered’s team of investigators were concerned, however, Tommy needn’t have worried. On 26 April 1943, Wethered submitted a short report on the likelihood or otherwise of Sneum being the traitor. It was entitled: ‘B1b. note re. case of SNEUM and TABLE TOP organization 74X.’ MI5 withheld it from a file labelled KV6/40, which was otherwise made available at the National Archive in Kew, west London, some sixty years later. On 11 July 2006, however, the Security Service revealed this much: ‘the gist of 74X in KV6/40 is that SNEUM was not in any position to leak to the Germans information regarding TABLE TOP.’
Although this confirmed that Thomas Sneum was still suspected of treachery as late as spring 1943, it also revealed that Wethered was convinced that Sneum simply couldn’t have been the traitor, due to the physical constraints he was under at the time of the leaks. Effectively, that meant Sneum was off the hook. But Tommy’s former spymasters wouldn’t have been pleased when unforeseen circumstances allowed him to return into wider social circulation.
In May 1943 Sneum left the village of Milton Ernest under a cloud after his relationship with Reeny was discovered by her husband. ‘He came back early one day and found us in my bedroom,’ recalled Sneum. ‘I was still pulling my trousers up so it was obvious what had been happening. It wasn’t a funny situation at the time, because there were guns all over the farmhouse, and he looked angry and upset enough to use one.