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By Root 412 0

He had achieved contact with Danish Intelligence and forged a basic understanding with their top officers, despite lingering resentment on both sides. He had found two possible bases for future radio transmissions. And he had gained a foothold in Copenhagen. Furthermore, he had learned plenty about the Nazi occupation from his audacious dealings with the Germans and from Kaj Oxlund’s meticulous reports. It was time to tell his spymasters back in London of his successes.

Sneum decided that he and Christophersen would try to transmit from Oxlund’s apartment, not least because he didn’t want his fellow agent to know the location of his hideaway in Christianshavn. Perhaps he ought to have been more concerned about what Oxlund’s neighbors already knew about Christophersen and his increasingly bizarre behavior.

The caretaker, Hans Soetje, was still calling Christophersen ‘The Russian’, and the picture he later painted of his new neighbor while helping Danish police write a report would have been funny had it not constituted so much danger for the two agents. The report said:

Soetje’s wife sometimes cleaned Oxlund’s apartment, and at certain times when she thought she was alone ‘The Russian’ suddenly appeared. He never spoke to Soetje’s wife except to say ‘good day’ or ‘sorry.’ Soetje himself also had to do maintenance jobs in the apartment once in a while, and realized that ‘The Russian’ was lying down in the bedroom. Soetje never spoke to him, though he realized that ‘The Russian’ was not on the official list of who was living in the apartment.

Once ‘The Russian’ appeared with a beard and sideburns, and sometimes a small British moustache. Soetje didn’t know if it was a natural beard, but he thought it looked artificial. Once he saw ‘The Russian’ in bed and didn’t think he had the beard, though he wasn’t sure if he had seen correctly because otherwise ‘The Russian’ definitely had a beard at that time.

Amid all this suspicion, Sneum travelled to an evening rendezvous with Christophersen in the first-floor apartment at Noekkerosevej. Sigfred’s task would be to send the message after Tommy had encoded it with numbers, using variations from one of three sources chosen back in England. The first of these sources was a thirty-nine-letter word that Sneum had learned as a youngster in order to impress his family and friends. It was a medicine called Monobromisolvalerianylkarbamidtabletter, used by his father for his heart condition. Now it could prove to be a lifesaver for Tommy. The second was a Danish love poem, ‘Gaeld’, by Erik Bertelsen. It told of a man who was financially poor but romantically rich. The third was Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. It was such a popular book that you could buy the same edition in England and Denmark, without updates or corrections to confuse the code. It was this novel which formed the basis for Sneum’s first coded message. The procedure was simple: Tommy gave the British specific page, line, word and letter numbers, and so created new words.

Christophersen and Sneum were not allowed to know each other’s code type or source. But both men knew that each message had to be preceded by a personal two-letter, pre-code ‘signature.’ This was a further safeguard against any attempted impersonation of MI6 agents by the Nazis. Tommy quickly noticed that Christophersen had started to transmit without his pre-code signature so he forced him to begin again, adding to the strain on the radio man’s nerves. The evening silence had already done much to unsettle Sigfred. It seemed that every tap he made on the Morse key-pad created an explosion of sound that he feared could be heard halfway down the street. Unfortunately, there was little they could do to drown out the clatter of his work. ‘Christophersen’s hand began to tremble uncontrollably,’ claimed Sneum later, painting a picture of a man who wasn’t always as brave as he wanted to be. ‘He was already doing what most Danes didn’t dare to do, but he got afraid as soon as there was any danger. And I couldn’t have that.’ Christophersen seemed to fear that