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By Root 438 0

and now she was central to his world, one in which he could be double-crossed, tortured or shot at any time. He decided to live for the moment, and embraced the mutual attraction. Emmy had a ‘mature arrangement’ with her husband, who was unlikely to cause problems. Her daughter would almost certainly be less understanding, so Tommy and Mrs Valentin were careful to hide how close they had become from Birgit.

Sneum needed all the comfort he could get, because he was about to make his mission a lot more dangerous. Daringly, he decided to return to the Hotel Cosmopolit in order to renew his acquaintance with some of the Abwehr officers based there:

I had to keep up my contact with the Abwehr to get information for Britain. The British knew I was going to do this and wanted me to do it. Personally, I had been more worried about the contact I’d had with the Germans before I had flown to England, in case it was taken the wrong way in London. I didn’t have that fear any more.

The Abwehr people were quite relaxed at this time because they were still convinced they were going to win the war. The Cosmopolit was quite an exclusive hotel but you could go into the bar and meet these people. Most of my dealings were with chaps who didn’t know who I was; but when a few of them recognized me and asked where I had been for so long, I told them: ‘I have been shooting in Jutland and on Fanoe, and I have my family.’

Though his story was plausible, Sneum’s tactic represented a massive risk. One phone call to Hauptmann Meinicke on Fanoe to check the facts could have been catastrophic. At first there would have been confusion since, as far as Meinicke was concerned, the plucky young flight lieutenant was dead. But with the help of a detailed description the penny would have dropped soon enough, leaving Sneum’s capture inevitable. Indeed, had any suspicious Abwehr officers made the link between the young man standing before them, beer in hand, and the spectacular escape attempt by two Danish pilots back in June, it would all have been over.

Perhaps the horrendous penalty for anyone caught spying served to protect Sneum during these dangerous exchanges. If his sudden reappearance in the Cosmopolit did set off alarm bells inside the heads of any German officers, they must have dismissed such concerns as foolish. After all, no one implicated in the June escape, or secretly loyal to the Allies, would be stupid enough to walk into German Intelligence Headquarters in Copenhagen and casually prop up the bar there. The pilots who had tried to escape to England were supposed to be dead anyway. And even if they had survived somehow, it was highly unlikely that either man would be back in Copenhagen so soon, and certainly not in the Cosmopolit. Simple geography was also on Sneum’s side: Odense and Andersen’s farm seemed a world away, just like Fanoe. The Abwehr men based in the capital were primarily concerned with events in Copenhagen, and how to keep the occupation there peaceful.

So Tommy was able to exude his usual relaxed confidence, keep his cool and hope that his luck held. He tried not to express any emotion when the conversation in the bar turned to Britain one night. A German intelligence officer, drunk and treating Sneum like a long-lost friend, clearly felt as though he could speak freely, particularly when his boastful revelation merely served to confirm Nazi superiority over the enemy. ‘We get running information from England,’ he confided with a smile. ‘The British think they have caught all our spies, but we still have a good organization over there.’

If ever Tommy needed further incentive to drink with the loosetalking officers of the Abwehr, this was it, whatever the dangers involved. The problem was that the threat didn’t come solely from the occupiers. Occasionally, his arrival or departure from the Cosmopolit was noticed by observers from groups trying to form a resistance to the occupation. To them, Sneum’s actions appeared to be those of a man with a death wish. Either that or he was a German agent who couldn’t be trusted. Tommy