The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [49]
He admitted later, ‘I told the interrogators at the Royal Patriotic School quite openly that I’d had contact with the Germans. That was how I had been able to get hold of much of the intelligence I had brought over. They didn’t seem to understand or accept this principle; they were suspicious of anyone who showed anything but outright hatred for all Germans.’
Though Sneum found the approach of his British hosts absurdly simplistic, even he could see why they were finding his account hard to swallow. He had filmed new technology at Fanoe right under the noses of the Germans. He had rebuilt a plane and flown it out of Nazi-occupied territory. He had stepped onto the wing for a spot of mid-air refuelling. Tommy remembered:
I was aware, as I told them the story of my escape yet again, that it didn’t sound very likely. They didn’t believe what I was saying, at least some of them didn’t, even though they had RAF backgrounds themselves. Perhaps that was the very reason they didn’t believe me, because they hadn’t heard of such a thing being done before, especially not in a Hornet Moth. They said it was all lies.
But what could I do? I just told them the truth again and again. On the question of the pictures and sketches of the radar, I kept telling Flight Lieutenant Gregory to check for authenticity with the British Legation in Stockholm, and talk to Captain Henry Denham or Squadron Leader Donald Fleet about me. And above all I kept asking Gregory when my films would be back from their laboratory, because I thought that when they saw the quality of those images, it would end the argument. That’s when he told me where they had been sent. The post office. Can you imagine?
Before long there was a knock at the door. Gregory, normally a dashing, confident figure, seemed angry and embarrassed when the news was delivered, and with good reason. He had to turn back to Sneum and tell him what had happened. Tommy remembered his own anger at what he heard:
Nearly all my films had been destroyed at the post office in a mixup. Apparently someone had failed to follow basic instructions, even though I had clearly marked both thirty-meter reels of sixteenmillimeter film with labels written in big letters on their cassettes, in case anything should happen.
I had a roll of reversible ‘diafilm’, which was positive on one side and negative on the other. I labelled that one ‘Reversible.’ The other cassette I marked ‘Negative.’ But the people at the post office probably couldn’t read, because they developed the negative film as reversible and the reversible film as negative.
I went mad when I realized what had happened. ‘You stupid bastards,’ I told them. ‘Do you know how many times I risked my life for those films?’ They were trying to calm me down but I just kept going. ‘Are you intelligence officers? What is intelligent about you? Why did you send them to a fucking post office in the first place?’
I couldn’t believe it. They were labelled so that not even an idiot could fail to understand. I demanded to see what was left of them, and that gave Gregory an excuse to leave me to cool down for a while, I suppose. I was thinking, No wonder these stupid bastards are losing the war.
An ugly tension hung in the air for the best part of an hour, until two fresh faces appeared. A gentle-looking giant was first through the door, followed by another man who looked as though he enjoyed a good argument. Reginald Victor Jones, head of Britain’s Scientific Intelligence and a personal adviser to Winston Churchill, had just arrived with Charles Frank, his assistant. Gregory, who had made the decision to