The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [64]
‘It’s too dangerous to stay here and join the RAF,’ explained Sigfred. ‘Have you heard how many pilots are being killed? It’s too risky.’
‘What we’re going to be doing is a hell of a lot more dangerous than joining the RAF,’ Sneum told him. ‘Do you know what it’ll be like for us if we get caught?’
‘I’m not worried about that,’ Christophersen said dismissively.
Tommy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You’re not worried about being tortured or shot?’
‘We don’t have to let it get to that, do we?’ Sneum was speechless, so Sigfred filled the silence. ‘I’m in no hurry to die. I’ll do my bit, and a lot more. But if we get compromised, I want to survive.’
Tommy was stunned, and as he said later: ‘From that moment I considered him to be a danger to the mission, a threat to my safety, and a coward. We all had fears and doubts about how we would react when faced with torture. But you had to suppress those feelings.’
As a two-man team, Tommy and Christophersen were supposed to be ready to protect each other to the death on their return to Nazi-occupied Denmark. Yet here was a man who seemed to be implying that he would rather tell the Germans everything than face an unpleasant ordeal. As far as Sneum was concerned, Sigfred might as well have admitted on the spot that he would sell Tommy’s life in exchange for his own. Sneum got up and walked out.
Chapter 18
A RECIPE FOR DISASTER
THOMAS SNEUM CONFRONTED Colonel Rabagliati at the first opportunity. He couldn’t understand how someone like Christophersen had got this far in the selection process. Later Tommy emphasized: ‘By now I was completely opposed to using him, and I told the colonel that. I said, “He is afraid, he has warned me that he is only going back to Denmark because he believes it is certain death to stay in England, and he will tell the Germans everything if they get hold of him.”’
Rabagliati seemed to think Sneum was exaggerating his concerns, because he replied simply: ‘We haven’t got anyone else. You’ll have to use him.’
Tommy replied: ‘I can find you a number of better people you could use.’
But the spymaster wasn’t having it. ‘They must be trained here,’ he insisted.
With a tinge of bitterness, Sneum reflected later: ‘They thought if you hadn’t been trained in England, you couldn’t put your hand on a Morse code key.’
The policy would change later in the war, partly because of what later happened to Tommy. It was a security safeguard which had been put in place to prevent the Abwehr from using their own operators to send false messages, having tortured the relevant codes out of captured agents. SOE in Holland was destroyed through such German tactics, with nearly all the British-run spies eventually shot. So it was no wonder that SIS was keen to keep as much control as it could over radio communications.
‘It has to be that way,’ said Rabagliati. ‘The operators here need to know the personal Morse style of the sender to be sure that he’s genuine. They know Christophersen’s Morse hand now. It’s as simple as that. He’ll have to go with you.’
This logic still seemed like nonsense to Tommy. The personnel receiving the messages back in England were subject to such a rapid turnover that, within a few months, Sneum predicted that no one would be left who had even heard of Christophersen, let alone studied his Morse hand during training.
Looking back, Tommy attributed Rabagliati’s final decision to go with Christophersen no matter what the risks to the in-fighting between Britain’s covert services: ‘SOE was also trying to go into Denmark, and there was competition between them and SIS to see who could send the first team in. Personal pride came before the cause.’ According to some accounts, SOE were already angling to take over all covert operations in Denmark. And with