The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [165]
‘At that stage, SOE wouldn’t have wanted to be involved in any dirty business against any individual agents,’ he maintained. ‘It may be there were wheels within wheels. A security problem rather than a political problem.’
It crossed my mind that there wouldn’t have been a ‘security problem’ had Tommy not been forced into a corner as a result of the ‘political problem’ of interdepartmental rivalry, but I didn’t want to interrupt Ronnie when it was all coming back to him.
‘Sneum,’ he continued. ‘Yes, he came in at a time when the Princes had a better idea and were very much in control. They worked from a broader platform and they were able to deliver. I didn’t know to what extent Sneum had been trained and we decided to go with the Princes. They were the professionals.’
The whole story might have been very different if Tommy had bumped into Ronnie at the British Legation in Stockholm in February 1941, instead of meeting Donald Fleet and Henry Denham. If Turnbull had seen Sneum’s Freya radar intelligence, something the Princes had failed to supply or even understand, the Scotsman might not have been so dismissive of the spy who ended up working for SIS instead of SOE.
‘I didn’t give Sneum too much thought,’ admitted Ronnie.
‘Except when the Princes complained about him,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes, then I took notice,’ agreed Turnbull. ‘It was my duty to pass on that kind of information. I think Sneum was arrested in the end. Maybe it was his bad-tempered behavior. I think they picked him up in England.’
‘Weren’t you on the plane that took him to Scotland from Sweden?’ I enquired.
‘I don’t think so . . . I might have been. I don’t remember,’ Ronnie replied.
By the time he was locked up, Tommy understood the feasibility of the atom bomb, thanks to information supplied by Niels Bohr. Ironically, the man who eventually put Bohr on a plane from Stockholm to Britain on 30 September 1943 was none other than Ronnie Turnbull. But what had the Princes been able to tell Turnbull about the race to develop the atom bomb, given that they were supposedly the ‘professionals’ and ‘very much in control’?
‘I didn’t even know about it,’ admitted Turnbull.
I wondered whether Ronnie considered it a shame that Bohr had not been spirited out of Denmark earlier, to add his colossal intellect to the development of an Allied atom bomb. ‘I should have said so, yes,’ he replied, with refreshing honesty. Though he added, quite truthfully, ‘Bohr himself determined the timing.’
But how hard had the British tried to persuade Bohr to leave Copenhagen earlier? Even in 1943 neither the Princes nor Turnbull, by his own admission, understood the extraordinary scientific breakthrough that Bohr and Heisenberg had dared to debate in Copenhagen two years earlier. They were no more alert to atomic science than they had been to Freya radar. Sneum, on the other hand, knew the significance of both technologies, and had even given the British the name of Enrico Fermi, the Italian professor whom Bohr believed held the key to controlling such a bomb.
Sure enough, on 2 December 1942, Fermi demonstrated just how such awesome forces could be controlled. At the University of Chicago, he pulled out ZIP, a weighted safety rod, just far enough to send a nuclear pile critical, then tamed the monster he had created by pushing ZIP back into its original position. His success meant that it would be only a matter of time before the bomb was built.
If Sneum could gather so much crucial intelligence, what else could he have achieved had he not been caught in the crossfire between SOE and SIS? It was a thought-provoking question, and one I dearly wished Sneum and Turnbull to debate together. I asked Ronnie if he would be prepared to meet the spy Britain had left out in the cold, or talk to him over the phone.
‘Yes, I would,’ said Turnbull enthusiastically,