The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [2]
This living nightmare’s origins lay in Denmark, where a British national newspaper had sent me on an assignment. Some money had gone missing during the transfer of a Danish footballer to an English club. While investigating, I was driven along a busy Copenhagen highway which ran parallel with the Oeresund, the treacherous sea channel between Denmark and Sweden.
‘Did you know,’ said the taxi driver, ‘that some people tried to walk across that stretch of water to escape the Nazi occupation during the Second World War?’ He must have noticed the disbelieving expression on his passenger’s face. ‘It was frozen over at the time,’ the driver added, ‘but the ice wasn’t very solid. Some people made it; others didn’t.’
His story started me thinking: who were these people, so desperate to get away from the Nazis that they braved the fragile ice to try to reach a neutral country? I picked up history books and attempted some research. The years passed. Then I discovered that one of the men to whom the Copenhagen taxi driver had alluded was still alive. His was a particularly intriguing case, because he had spied for Britain during the war and remained a controversial figure, even as the twentieth century drew to a close. He was now said to be living in Switzerland. His name was Thomas Sneum. This sounded like a man worth meeting, even if it meant tracking him down in my spare time.
In February 1998 I flew to Switzerland in the hope of hearing Sneum’s story first hand. I called him as soon as the plane landed, the phone conversation was cordial, and he agreed to meet me the following day ... or so I thought. Waiting on his doorstep in peaceful, suburban Zurich on a cold, clear morning, I had no inkling of the reception he had prepared. Suddenly the door flew open and there he was, brandishing the pistol menacingly. Did Sneum think his visitor was merely pretending to be a reporter and was really someone far more threatening, recruited to exact revenge for some past misdemeanour? Maybe he held such a dim view of journalists that he felt this was the best way to greet them.
It was hard to see the funny side as this short, shrivelled man continued to aim his Browning directly at my heart. I kept my hands where he could see them and pleaded my case, trying to point out that there must have been a dreadful misunderstanding. Later he told me: ‘I can read people within the first few seconds of meeting them.’ In my case it wouldn’t have been difficult: the look of panic probably confirmed that I didn’t constitute any major threat. Gradually his anger seemed to give way to a more controlled suspicion. He refused to put the gun away, but he did eventually invite me in.
For such a notorious ladies’ man even to consider spending time in the company of someone who wasn’t a woman represented quite exceptional behavior, I would later discover. The fact that Tommy adored women—and they adored him—emerged quickly as one of the more obvious aspects of his story. As we became friends over the years, other vital components took much longer to establish.
Sneum’s pistol was just the first of many barriers to the truth over the next decade: for example, MI5 were still being obstructive in 2007. But from early on I was determined to get to the bottom of the story, which contained hidden depths almost as challenging as the Oeresund itself. It is fair to say that James Bond films have been made with more likely storylines. But Tommy Sneum’s story really happened. Ian Fleming’s hero wasn’t based on Sneum, but it is no exaggeration to say that he could have been.
‘James Bond was just a film character, and I would never have gone around shooting people under ridiculous conditions like he did,’ Sneum once