The Hornet's Sting (38 page)
Read The Hornet's Sting Online
Authors: Mark Ryan
Tags: #World War; 1939-1945 - Secret Service - Denmark, #Sneum; Thomas, #World War II, #Political Freedom & Security, #True Crime, #World War; 1939-1945, #Underground Movements, #General, #Denmark - History - German Occupation; 1940-1945, #Spies - Denmark, #Secret Service, #World War; 1939-1945 - Underground Movements - Denkamrk, #Political Science, #Denmark, #Biography & Autobiography, #Military, #Spies, #Intelligence, #Biography, #History
Tulle moved back to her parents’ home in the town of Ringsted, to the south-east of Copenhagen, so that she could grieve quietly. When an old friend rang her soon after her arrival, Tulle naturally expressed surprise, since few could have learned so quickly of her return. It had barely been a fortnight since her estranged husband had died. The friend was called Peter and he had also known Kaj in the past. He explained that he too had suffered a bereavement recently, and suggested they meet at a restaurant called Wiwex for dinner the following night. Tulle heard herself accepting without really knowing why she had.
The evening went pleasantly enough as they picked at their food and drowned their sorrows, until the conversation began to take a strange turn. Tulle was just starting to open up about Kaj when her escort asked about his friends in his final months, and in particular Thomas Sneum. Tulle was startled and asked why he wanted to know.
Peter came to the point. ‘Your husband was involved in certain activities. He may have done things that weren’t good for the fragile peace that exists in our country. We believe Thomas Sneum was also involved in those activities. Do you know anything about it?’
Tulle had a question of her own. ‘Who are you talking about when you say “we”?’
‘I’m a member of the Danish Nazi Party,’ replied Peter quite openly.
Tulle felt the anger welling up inside her. She stood up and sent the table and its contents crashing into the man. Having been humiliated in Ringsted’s plushest restaurant, the Nazi leapt up, drilled Tulle with a menacing stare and insulted her loudly. With that, he marched out, past waiters who were already trying to put the table back on its legs.
Tulle tried her best to apologize to the manager. ‘The problem is,’ she said tearfully, ‘I’m afraid I can’t pay. I didn’t bring any money.’
‘That’s quite all right, madam,’ replied the manager, who had witnessed the whole spectacle and was clearly on the same side as the late Kaj Oxlund had been. ‘It’s on the house.’
Detective-Sergeant Roland Olsen was a resistance sympathizer. But on 24 March 1942 he was put in a difficult position. Olsen was aware that the Danish police department was now liaising directly with the Germans, and that a middle-ranking Abwehr officer, Oberleutnant von Grene, was their point of contact on the delicate matter of the recently uncovered spy ring. He therefore fully understood that his superiors were under strong pressure to deliver firm results for their German masters. Given his own anti-Nazi leanings, however, Olsen didn’t want to deliver anything to von Grene, especially not one of the spies in question. So he was less than thrilled to receive a call at the police station that day from a Copenhagen restaurant, Café Bunis, informing him that a man they believed to be the hunted resistance figure Thomas Sneum had just reserved a table and was due to arrive in a few hours’ time.
Later Olsen wrote down his own account of these tricky moments. ‘I sat in my office and thought about it. The Germans would think of Sneum as an enemy spy. And now we, the Danish police, were supposed to arrest him because the Germans would want him delivered to them. But for spies in wartime there is only one sentence in court—death. Then it is back-against-the-wall time, and one salvo of gunfire ends it.’ While these thoughts were going through Olsen’s head, he came clean about the phone call from the restaurant in a frank conversation with his boss, Politikommissaer Odmar. Olsen explained later: ‘I told Odmar what I knew, that I would go to the restaurant but that I would not bring Sneum back under arrest. We could invent some story or other for the
Herrenvolk
[Germans] instead. We talked about it a little, and Odmar said he understood my point of view.’ But Odmar, who wasn’t an outright Nazi, still wanted Olsen to find a quick solution to the Sneum affair before the Germans had time to react. Everyone feared the backlash ithe agent continued to operate in Copenhagen for a second longer.
However, a message soon came through from the restaurant to say that the reservation made by the suspect had been cancelled. Olsen suddenly had a few more hours in which to come up with an answer. He felt that Werner Gyberg might help him find a way through this minefield, but Gyberg was behind bars and being questioned after the death of his employee, Thorbjoern Christophersen. With no other options, though, Olsen released an astonished Gyberg on 25 March and left him in Copenhagen’s Town Hall Square. Under the terms of the deal, Gyberg had to return within twenty minutes, having used his temporary freedom to arrange a meeting with Sneum for that very night. Worryingly for Olsen, however, there was still no sign of the businessman after half an hour. The detective recalled:
To think about something else, I bought some pigeon feed. This was the police department’s biggest case, about spies and parachutists, and there I was, acting like I didn’t care. German soldiers passed by, the sun shone on the Town Hall, but still no Gyberg. Finally he arrived and took me to his house. Duus Hansen turned up, took my pistol, and disappeared again. Eventually Sneum arrived through the back door of the cellar, and we greeted each other.
Tommy recalled later: ‘We arranged a meeting for that night with Duus Hansen, at his office just off the Town Hall Square. Olsen was going to be present with Gyberg and I agreed to attend with my brother-in-law, Bertelsen.’
Having set up the meeting, Gyberg was taken back into custody until the evening. ‘I knew you’d come back,’ said Olsen.
‘I wasn’t so sure,’ replied Gyberg.
That night the meeting went ahead as planned, and Olsen had the chance to sit down and talk with Duus Hansen for the first time. They would form an understanding which lasted for the rest of the war, and helped to keep Duus Hansen one step ahead of the Abwehr. By risking his life to attend the meeting, Tommy had therefore laid the foundations for the future police protection of Duus Hansen against the constant threat of discovery by the Germans. That, in turn, gave Duus Hansen the platform to assume a leading position in the Danish resistance. And his increasing importance led ultimately to his pivotal role in the delivery of precious V-rocket intelligence to the British later in the war.
Sneum’s position in late March 1942 contrasted sharply with Duus Hansen’s. It was obvious that Tommy’s time had run out in Copenhagen, and he would have to leave at the first opportunity. Men he didn’t trust had told him as much already. Now men he did trust were telling him exactly the same, and he knew his mission for the British was over. Later he recalled: ‘We had the typed reports of Christophersen’s latest revelations to the Swedes, and my friends told me that the Germans were increasing their efforts, and one day they would be sure to find me in a small country like Denmark. If I left, it would be better for Gyberg too. Those were some of the reasons why I agreed to go.’
Before planning his escape, Tommy suggested that Duus Hansen should renew attempts to contact the British-run spy who had survived the parachute drop that had killed Carl Bruhn just after Christmas. They all assumed that Bruhn’s partner must still be free somewhere in Denmark, and Sneum was convinced that the man would welcome such an approach if it were made discreetly. He was woris or the British after all, just as they were.
Although he didn’t know it at the time, by arguing strongly for this new link Tommy opened the way for Duus Hansen to work for SOE as well as SIS in the years to come. It was a piece of simple common sense unheard of at the time. The fierce interdepartmental rivalry between Britain’s two covert services, and the wasteful duplication it ensured, had almost killed Sneum and could still prove to be his downfall. Yet here he was, an SIS agent unwittingly doing SOE a favor, because he knew that the only important war was the one being waged against Hitler.
Duus Hansen’s account of his extraordinary meeting with Gyberg, Olsen and Sneum emphasizes Tommy’s importance right up to the end of his mission:
Police investigations led to the fact that Sneum had to leave the country, as his continuing work was impossible, due to the Danish police’s and the Germans’ knowledge of it. But the whole investigation led to the establishment of some very useful connections inside the police [Roland Olsen]. Already, before Sneum had left the country, two other parachutists were dropped near Haslev. One [Bruhn] was killed while the other, [Mogens] Hammer, started organizational work within the country. We had tried to get in contact with Hammer without success, and it was a deal between Sneum and me that I should do everything to get in contact and achieve a successful working relationship with this man, which I managed to do.
T
HE MORNING AFTER that historic meeting, something happened which might yet have trapped Sneum. Politikommissaer Odmar ordered Detective Sergeant Olsen to surround 2 Harald Jensensgade, the building where Else Sneum’s father, Carl Jensen, had a third-floor apartment. There was no time for Olsen to forewarn Tommy or the occupants of the targeted apartment, because he was sent to the location with two other detectives, Kaj Andersen and Oestergaard Nielsen. Olsen must have been praying that Sneum hadn’t decided to say goodbye to his wife and baby before trying to escape to Sweden.
The policemen set up surveillance of the building, and Olsen’s colleagues prepared to pounce. Odmar had issued strict instructions that anyone leaving the apartment was to be apprehended. If Sneum had been stupid enough to have had any contact with his family in those final hours, he certainly would have paid the price.
Tommy, though, had been more preoccupied with the risks involved in placing his future in the hands of the Swedish authorities. He had sought a final assurance from the Princes that he wouldn’t be left to rot in a Swedish jail. Later he remembered: ‘I received that guarantee and told Arne Helvard it was time to get across if he was coming. He said he was.’ But Sneum was still sufficiently worried about the fate which awaited them on the other side of the border to request a final conference that morning with Niels-Richard Bertelsen, who took a chance by visiting Tommy’s last Copenhagen lair in an unmarked police car.
‘There’s going to be a problem with the Swedes, Niels-Richard,’ Tommy said. ‘I just know it. I’ve never trusted them.’
His brother-in-law didn’t see how he could help, and reminded Sneum that the best way to steer clear of trouble was to avoid capture. But Tommy suggested that Bertelsen could influence events as a last resort. He told the policeman how, before Christmas, he had stumbled across the names of some Swedish agents operating in Poland and Berlin. ‘I’m going to give them to you,’ he said. ‘If I do get caught over there, and they lock me up for longer than Lunding says they will, you can threaten to give the names of their agents to the Germans. If you don’t get a postcard from Stockholm by the start of June, with a code word to confirm my freedom, and you know I didn’t freeze to death on the ice, then you’ll also know they’ve locked me up and thrown away the key. So you send an anonymous letter to the Swedish Legation in Copenhagen, warning that their spy ring is about to be blown because of what they’ve done to me. You tell them another letter has been put away for safe keeping with all the relevant information on their spies in the east, and that letter will be handed over to the Germans if I’m not released immediately. That’ll make them think twice. I’ll be out in no time.’
‘I don’t think I could do that,’ said Bertelsen, looking horrified. ‘It’s madness.’
‘Take these names anyway,’ Sneum told the policeman, handing him a piece of paper. ‘Keep them and hide them, and only use them if you think it is absolutely necessary. There are twelve names on the list. For every genuine name of an agent, two on the list are false.’
Later Sneum explained his ruthless logic:
I gave my brother-in-law a number of names of personnel who didn’t exist, so the Germans would never be sure who was real and who wasn’t. They would have a hell of a lot of work to do to clear up the mess, if it came to that. But I felt pretty sure that the Swedes would back down.
Spying is a dirty game and at that point I thought that if the Swedes played dirty, then I was prepared to fight dirty. I didn’t have a high opinion of the Swedes and I believed that the work I was doing was more important. I didn’t think anyone in Germany could get any decent information out anyway, because a transmitter wouldn’t have lasted five minutes there before it was discovered.
From my point of view, I just wanted to have something in reserve if it all went wrong for me in Sweden. I wanted to know in my own mind that I hadn’t used all my ammunition already; that there was something still in reserve. And if these agents were so important, then the Swedes wouldn’t risk compromising them by detaining me.