The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [164]
Tommy’s next job title might have sounded boring, but it allowed him to travel and meet more women. He became administrative director of the European Association of Advertising Agencies. ‘I was always on the move and that suited me down to the ground,’ he said. ‘You can have a girlfriend in every town.’
But even confirmed womanizers are vulnerable; and in Munich, Germany, he fell in love with his third wife, a stunningly beautiful neurologist called Katherine. ‘She was twenty years younger than me and she stayed good-looking as she got older,’ observed Sneum. However, although Katherine gave him two more children, Christian and Alexandra, yet again the marriage didn’t last. Most women found Tommy’s forceful personality difficult to handle in the long run, and Katherine may have been too young at the time to cope with him. He raised the children in Switzerland, and though they probably didn’t see their mother as often as they would have liked, he did a good job.
By the time I met Tommy, Chris and Sandra had grown into fine adults and flown the nest, though they still helped their father to face the frustrating onset of old age whenever they could. I also met a middle-aged Marianne, his war baby with Else, when she came to visit one day. The relationship between father and daughter was clearly strained, perhaps still a casualty of that war. Sneum was such an uncompromising character that in some ways he had become more isolated than he would have liked. But at least that meant he had time to sit down and tell his extraordinary story.
Time had changed Tommy’s appearance but not his views. He had made it his business both during and after the war to find out precisely who had been responsible for his imprisonment. In later life he was still bitter about Britain’s Special Operations Executive, and specifically blamed its Danish Section for what had happened to him: ‘The SOE were shits and sent people to their deaths without bothering about it,’ he alleged. ‘They always talked about fighting for England, but they were really fighting for their own positions. Hollingworth and Turnbull had never been in the field but they had me put in prison.’
In 1953, Hollingworth still sounded proud that SOE had won the spying game against SIS in Denmark when he answered a letter from the Danish historian Jorgen Hastrup:
When you touched upon the short-lived rivalry between Sneum, working for SIS, and SOE, do not forget that normally it was not SOE’s job to collect intelligence, except in so far as it was essential to its own work. In a larger country SIS would feed SOE with intelligence. After the Sneum affair, however, the position was reversed as far as Denmark was concerned, and we became the channel to SIS.
What Hollingworth, with a touch of flippant triumphalism, described as ‘short-lived rivalry’ almost cost Sneum his life.
In the fullness of time, Ronnie Turnbull developed a healthier perspective. Although it was true that he never spied behind enemy lines, I learned that sending men to their deaths did bother him, particularly the Rasputin-like liquidation of Hans Henrik Larsen by his own side in Denmark, a killing which had been authorized by SOE in London. I heard this from Ronnie himself, having tracked him down to São Paulo, Brazil. He was perfectly happy to discuss the war years on the phone, and we developed a good relationship which we maintained in his final years. Tragically, his Brazilian wife Thereza, with whom he was so happy during the war, was killed in a car crash in Copenhagen way back in 1945. But his love affair with Brazil lived on, and eventually he remarried and moved there.
By the twenty-first century, after decades of speaking Portuguese, Turnbull’s Scottish lilt had taken on