The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [61]
This simple act probably saved many lives among the British agents and commandos who were sometimes asked to pose as German soldiers on the European mainland during daring missions to infiltrate and destroy key enemy installations. Duplicates of Tommy’s German manual would have been distributed to all SIS sections as a matter of urgency. Thanks to him, German uniforms could now be copied with a precision which made a mockery of the outdated knowledge being imparted by the British intelligence specialists of the day.
Sneum reflected:
They had been too full of their own importance to check their facts properly. I understood the mentality of island people, coming from an island myself. But I have to admit that the arrogance showed by some of the instructors did anger and worry me. Some instructors knew the names of the capital cities of Europe; others didn’t, and acted as though it didn’t matter too much, because the cities were foreign. At the same time, the British honestly believed they could teach me more about my own country than I knew myself.
When the time came to learn the full range of coding, which was an essential part of any professional spy’s work, Sneum felt luckier. Mr Jenkins, his instructor, was a charming, elderly gentleman untroubled by ego.
He was very kind and I appreciated his patience more than anything. He taught me how to create a coded message using a page in a newspaper or book of my choice. You had a personal prefix to your own special code in order to protect communications. You learned your personal five-figure number, then the code. A group of five figures gave the code type. You chose a book to use for coding and decoding the messages you sent. You had a page and a line and you had a prefix for that. Five figures, code, number. You were tested repeatedly, using different novels and newspapers.
The code course went well and Sneum was a model student. But, as usual, once he had worked hard, he liked to play hard. ‘As soon as we had finished I took Mr Jenkins to a pub where I knew they had bottles of cold Danish beer. It made a pleasant change from having to put ice in the warm English bitter, because that seemed to shock people. I bought every single bottle of Danish beer they had. The bar staff kept it all in the fridge for me until I was ready to drink each one. Meanwhile, Mr Jenkins told wonderful stories, full of British humour.’
But time was short. Sneum wrote in a military report later: ‘I was told that I would soon be going back to Denmark, and therefore there wasn’t enough time for me to get sufficiently educated in Morse-Coding to use a transmitter myself. And because of that, they would find a man to go with me.’ Perhaps it had always been the intention of Tommy’s SIS spymasters to partner him with a radio expert. The added advantage of a two-man team was that if Sneum were killed or captured, the radio operator could take over all intelligence-gathering duties until a replacement agent was sent. Tommy was less than thrilled with the idea of becoming part of a double-act with someone he didn’t know, but he decided to say nothing until the radio operator’s identity had been revealed to him. That way he could assess for himself the character of the man upon whose competence his life might soon depend.
As July turned into August, the emphasis of the MI6 training turned away from cerebral matters and towards ruthless action. Sneum endured a punishing physical training course, made no easier by the fact that Tommy’s fitness had dipped since he had left the Danish Navy. For weeks that summer he had either been sitting in confined spaces or drinking beer. But at least his insatiable appetite for women had kept him in some sort of shape. And a military man of twenty-four finds fitness easy enough to retrieve, given the right routine. Soon Tommy was running up hills and climbing ropes with the best of them,