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visit from Lunding. If some sort of formal agreement could be achieved between the two men, it would be a feather in Turnbull’s cap, a clear signal to London that he was respected by the most important intelligence officers in Denmark. It didn’t matter to Ronnie that nothing would be done to undermine the Nazi occupation of Denmark for the foreseeable future. He was still convinced that Danish Intelligence knew best, and that SOE should therefore do as they said. And he certainly wasn’t about to allow an agent of the rival British intelligence agency to get in his way.

With all this in mind, Turnbull sent an urgent message to London on 10 January 1942. It argued against sending any more SOE agents as successors to the unfortunate Bruhn and Hammer:

... 4. I fear that if we press on wildly, we may antagonize the Princes, who are already upset over continued presence of C’s [the code name of SIS’s chief, Stewart Menzies] two men in 4532’s [Munck’s code number] LAND, and this would endanger whole of booklet.

5. In addition, it would be tragic if we were to miss visit of one of Princes here.

Sneum and Christophersen were being cast as part of the problem, rather than the solution, because they were upsetting Turnbull’s best contacts by their ‘continued presence’ in ‘4532’s LAND’—Denmark. The reputation that Sneum had built for himself during his dealings with R.V. Jones seemed to count for nothing now. As far as SOE were concerned, SIS’s efforts to gain a foothold in Denmark had achieved nothing but trouble.

Sneum would need all his nerve in the weeks to come, because he was up against much more than the German occupiers. Threatening his survival were the dinosaurs of Danish Intelligence, an incompetent and frightened spy partner, one Allied intelligence agency that wanted him out of Denmark, and another that seemed to have all but deserted him.

Chapter 28

HUNTED

TOMMY WAS NOW READY TO hunt down Sigfred Christophersen. His brother-in-law, the detective Niels-Richard Bertelsen, was perfectly placed to assist in the search. Within a couple of days he had furnished Tommy with an address for Thorbjoern Christophersen in Kongens Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, and Sneum wasted no time in going there.

Having watched Sigfred and Thorbjoern leave the building, he broke into their apartment. It took only minutes to find what he was looking for. With a mixture of triumph and disgust, Sneum recalled later:

I got hold of Sigfred’s codes, which, contrary to all British regulations, he was keeping inside the lining of one of his jackets. I wrote the whole bloody lot down, so that I could prove to the British I’d got them. I suspected Christophersen would try to convince the British that I was a shit who was afraid of this, that and the other. But he was the one who was afraid. Even so, I believed he would tell the British his own story and substitute my name for his.

Before long the Christophersen brothers strolled back into Thorbjoern’s apartment to be confronted by Sneum’s menacing presence. Tommy remembered: ‘Sigfred froze and began to tremble. He turned white and seemed to realize that the game was up. He probably thought I was going to kill him right there. I wanted to, but I knew I wouldn’t get away with it.’ So he simply told Sigfred that he knew about his dealings with Duus Hansen and the stories he had made up. He insisted that he would be the one to handle all future contact with Bang and Olufsen’s chief engineer. Furthermore, Christophersen would have to hand over all his radio crystals, return the money he had taken, and move back in with Kaj Oxlund. Any future attempts to run away would not be dealt with so gently.

Sigfred knew he was in no position to argue, so he agreed to all Tommy’s demands, anxious perhaps to keep Thorbjoern out of the firing line. It must have seemed to Christophersen that Sneum was capable of hunting him down wherever he ran. His best chance of survival now was to do as he was told. Cautiously, Tommy allowed himself to entertain the thought that he had at last gained control over radio