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sure Himmler was the target. We still had that steel longbow in the family house near Zurich when I was a boy. I used to try, without success, to pull back its string. My father always told me that he had almost assassinated Himmler with that longbow. I believed him at the time and I still believe it today. I don’t think he wanted to make any more of it later in his life, because he didn’t actually get round to killing Himmler. And there was so much that he did manage to do that there wasn’t much point in going on about what he might have done.
     
    To some extent, Tommy himself was relieved that he failed to carry out the hit:
    There is a desire in every man for revenge at some level or other, and Adolf Hitler, the uneducated little bastard, had invaded my country. I became obsessed with getting revenge for that, because I was so proud to be a Danish officer. If you have a rotten society like Nazi Germany, it is no good killing low-level members of that society. You have to kill the leaders. But I was so enthusiastic about my ideas that I only realized the possible consequences when my sister Margit challenged me around that time. She said: ‘What about the family? What about Father and Mother? You can’t do it.’ They would probably have shot my family if I’d killed a top Nazi, so I’m lucky that it didn’t happen in the end. Sometimes I felt ashamed that I didn’t consider the consequences for my family while I was laying those plans.
    Also, if you killed Himmler, you immediately spoiled the whole intelligence-gathering game for ever, because there would have been so much more security. So there was an advantage attached to not killing him. As for Oda, I never told her what I had been planning to do from the window of her flat. And I still loved her for many years after the war. But we never got back together.
     
    Although he later found positives in the fact that the assassination attempt had to be aborted, at the time it was deeply frustrating for Tommy. In early 1941 he felt he had lost both the girl and the chance to make a telling impact on the course of the war. But soon enough many more opportunities would arise in both spheres, and Thomas Sneum would be ready to seize them.

Chapter 4
     

A TASTE OF FREEDOM
    A S HIMMLER FLEW AWAY to safety in that first week of February 1941, Tommy was left in Denmark, still feeling trapped. Yet he remained as determined as ever to break through the wall of ice that enveloped the Danish coast. Instead of looking west to Britain for an escape route, he turned his attentions eastwards, to neutral Sweden. Since it was much closer, Tommy knew he would have a more realistic chance of getting there. And perhaps the Swedes could provide the first stepping stone to Britain.
    Sneum was beaten to the British Legation in Stockholm by a young man he knew only vaguely, but one whose arrival would have serious repercussions for his war. Ronald Turnbull was a charming young Scot who was busily establishing a field headquarters for the Special Operations Executive’s Danish Section in the Swedish capital. The SOE, created with the personal approval of Winston Churchill, was tasked with setting Nazi-occupied Europe ablaze with the fires of resistance. Anyone who had known Turnbull just five years earlier would have been surprised by his appointment. As a Cambridge University student in the 1930s, he had sent fan mail to Hitler, declaring himself to be a keen supporter of all things German. ‘I wrote to Hitler and I’ve got a letter from him somewhere,’ he said later. ‘In the early days I thought Hitler was a great man, which turned out not to be the case. I was vice-president of the Anglo-German Association at Cambridge. We wanted to get closer to the Germans, particularly their youth.’
    Before long the scales fell from Turnbull’s eyes and his opinion of what was happening in Germany changed. When he left university he stood as a Liberal candidate for Bethnal Green and