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Smarting from his failure to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi with his longbow, Sneum had finally spotted a weakness in the German ring of steel around his country. He upset his good friend Kjeld Pedersen and their resistance colleague Christian Michael Rottboell by insisting that he must use the route alone. It would be safer that way, he told them firmly, and they had to accept his decision, however reluctantly.

So, on 20 February 1941, Tommy set out for Kastrup Airport. He carried with him an update on the radar installation on Fanoe, where the Germans had been building a third tower for their early-warning system. He also had facts and figures about the Nazi occupation of Denmark and German troop movements. An hour on a civilian plane took him to Roenne Airfield on Bornholm, a Danish island within striking distance of the Swedish mainland. A couple of days later he climbed aboard a huge ferry which, aided by ice-cutters, carved a path to Ystad on the Swedish coast. The first, nervous minutes of 23 February saw him posing as a businessman in front of a yawning customs official on the quayside. Tommy dreaded a search of his belongings or clothes, but the lazy official simply stamped his passport and directed him to the night train for Stockholm. Sneum couldn’t show any signs of the exhilaration he felt. He was free of the Nazi occupation, however temporarily.

Sleep came easily on the train once the adrenalin wore off. Before dawn, making sure that he wasn’t followed as he left Stockholm train station, Tommy made his way to the Strandvagen peninsula outside the city. Soon after it opened for official business, he proudly entered the British Legation.

‘I’m Flight Lieutenant Thomas Sneum of the Danish Fleet Air Arm and I have a lot of important information,’ he announced at reception. He was led to Squadron Leader Donald Fleet, the ageing but enthusiastic Assistant Air Attaché. A smiling Fleet decided to take Sneum straight to the office of Captain Henry Denham, the Naval Attaché, who operated from the kitchen wing of the Legation.

Turnbull, who had attended some of the same Copenhagen functions as Sneum during the winter of 1939-40, was nowhere to be seen. Had Tommy renewed his acquaintance with Ronnie that day, the brave Dane’s war could have turned out very differently. Turnbull might well have taken one look at all the excellent information in Sneum’s possession and recruited him on the spot for SOE Denmark. Denham worked in close proximity to Turnbull, but answered to a different British chain of command. ‘I wasn’t employed to help the Admiralty,’ Turnbull pointed out. By the same token, Denham wasn’t employed to help SOE.

The dynamic between the two men was curious. Both had worked at Britain’s Copenhagen Legation, and they had been repatriated by the Nazis on the same sealed train. Turnbull now worked with Denham’s former secretary, Pamela Tower, but ‘She was still in love with Henry,’ Ronnie claimed. Since Turnbull’s arrival in Stockholm, Denham had offered him access to any routine naval information at his disposal, but the SOE man later said dismissively, ‘We didn’t need ordinary intelligence.’ It seemed that Denham and Turnbull shared almost everything, but when it came to the precious new secrets that Sneum had brought into the building, there would be no sharing, even though this was precisely the sort of extraordinary intelligence Turnbull craved.

As a regular naval officer, Denham was obliged to pass any significant intelligence through the established Admiralty channels, which led through Naval Intelligence to the Secret Intelligence Service in London. Turnbull, meanwhile, had to report to his own SOE spymaster back in Britain, Commander Ralph Hollingworth. Denham wasn’t about to entrust the ‘amateurs’ at SOE with vital scientific intelligence, no matter how much he liked Turnbull on a personal level. Had Sneum’s discoveries landed on Turnbull’s desk rather than Denham’s, he too would have wanted to send them exclusively to his own organization, SOE. And the source of such valuable intelligence was to