The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [166]
I put the same proposal to Tommy. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There was a time when I wanted to kill Turnbull. I don’t want to do that any more, but I don’t want to meet him, either. And why waste the price of a phone call to Brazil? I know what he did and so does he. At the very least, Turnbull chose the wrong heroes to worship. I don’t think he had very much knowledge of people’s character and ideas.’
‘You might be surprised,’ I suggested. ‘Did you know, for example, that he has admitted that his boss, Hollingworth, was more interested in quantity than quality when it came to the SOE agents they sent into Denmark?’
‘He said that?’ It was unusual to see Tommy astonished. ‘Then, for once, I agree with him. But I still don’t want to talk to him.’
At the risk of infuriating Tommy, who was by now a firm friend, I suggested that it was getting rather late in the day to be so bitter. I even dared to tell him that I liked Ronnie, as a result of the many telephone conversations we had enjoyed. There was a silence, and I feared that Tommy’s volcanic temper might erupt.
‘Unfortunately, it is true: I have felt bitter for far too long about what happened back then, and it has actually more or less destroyed my happiness in life,’ he admitted poignantly.
I never did manage to organize their reunion, and Ronnie Turnbull died shortly after his return to his native Scotland in 2005. Tommy lived on, and was no less fascinating or provocative as he neared the end of his life. Sometimes, apparently for fun, he used to make boasts about having ‘penetrated’ the British Secret Service, and waited for my reaction. Once I asked him if the British really had caught all the German spies in wartime England, as was often claimed. Tommy sat there with a fiendish smile on his face, saying nothing. The silence set my heart and mind racing, and I no longer knew if he was being playful or serious. I even revisited the evidence, and wondered whether my friend Sneum had fooled everybody, including me.
Dick White and Geoffrey Wethered of MI5 had been certain there was a traitor in London’s Danish circle, but they had never been able to find him. Tommy was investigated and cleared. I wrote to MI5 for clarification of a document they had withheld from a file relating to their investigation of Sneum in 1943. They wrote back and revealed: ‘Sneum was not in any position to leak to the Germans information regarding TABLE TOP [the SOE organization in Denmark].’ They meant that at the time of the leaks he was either in prison or under local arrest in Bedfordshire. But we know he smuggled at least one message out of prison, and his sexual prowess earned him plenty of rides to London during his so-called local arrest. So could MI5 have got it wrong?
For that to be true, R.V. Jones must also have been mistaken when dedicating Tommy’s paperback edition of Most Secret War to ‘one of the heroes of this book and the war.’ Could the brilliant professor’s assessment have been based on the Sneum he had known before the spy became embittered by his treatment at the hands of the British authorities? Did Tommy ultimately turn on his captors? Ralph Hollingworth seemed to think he might even have gone over to the Germans long before. Could he have been right all along?
It was all starting to play on my mind, so, making sure he wasn’t armed, I plucked up the courage to ask him straight. ‘It’s too late for anyone to do anything about this, Tommy, so perhaps you could tell me the truth, if you’ve been hiding anything up to now. Were you a double-agent?’
‘No,’ he replied, without taking any apparent offense. ‘I never told the Germans anything they didn’t know already.’
He understood why I had to ask the question. Maybe he had been suspected in some quarters all his life because he positively encouraged suspicion, perhaps to remain the center of attention. He also loved a battle of wits, especially when he knew that he alone held all the answers.