By then a clandestine radio service was already in operation. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had helped set up two stations for broadcasting information back to London. One, codenamed Skylark-A, was in Oslo. The other, Skylark-B, was in Trondheim, under the direction of Erik Welle-Strand who was also based at the Institute. The students formed a pool of potential spies and saboteurs. Their natural patriotism was sharpened by resentment at the German presence which, despite the theoretical kinship the invaders felt for their fellow Aryans, was clumsy and arrogant. When black-bordered notices appeared around the town announcing the first executions of resistants, indignation curdled into hatred.
Skylark-B sent back important information on troop and naval movements. It took a year for the Gestapo to track the transmitter down. Rørholt had just finished a transmission when the secret police arrived. He said later he escaped ‘after an unintentional shooting match with the Germans … most of the others were captured. Since I had escaped the Germans blamed me for most of what had been done.’19 He made his way to neutral Sweden and then on to Britain where he joined the Norwegian navy. There he teamed up with Polish officers and technicians in a workshop near London working on miniature radio transmitters. Now the Admiralty was asking him to go back to Norway. His task was to set up another, more comprehensive radio network, to spy on Tirpitz. Even though he was well known to the Gestapo and his father was a hostage in their hands, he agreed.
He had one night to spend in London before flying to Shetland where the exiled Norwegian resistance had a base. He drew some money from a bank in the City and had a lavish dinner at the Savoy. Two days later, on 20 January, with a Lieutenant John Turner, on attachment to Naval Intelligence, he flew to Lerwick. They put up at the Queens Hotel and spent days discussing the details of the operation. Rørholt was to travel by sea to Trondheim, carrying a number of transmitters powerful enough to send a signal to Naval Intelligence headquarters. He was to identify potential agents in useful locations who would then make regular reports of enemy activity in their areas, particularly anything related to Tirpitz.
Rørholt was taken to Norway by a seaman called Leif Larsen. Larsen was thirty-six years old, quiet and modest, a brilliant sailor and a natural and inspirational leader. He had learned his craft as master of a small passenger ship that plied the southern Norwegian coast and had an intimate knowledge of its confused contours of islands and inlets. He escaped from Norway in February 1941 aboard a fishing boat, the Motig 1, and joined an outfit set up by the Special Operations Executive, the Norwegian Naval Independent Unit. It operated a ferry service using disguised fishing vessels carrying agents and saboteurs to and from the Norwegian coast and became famous as the ‘Shetland Bus’.
There was a six-day wait before the weather allowed them to sail. Rørholt used the time to dye his blond hair black. It was not much of a disguise, as the suspiciously raven locks clashed with his blue Scandinavian eyes. They set off on Saturday, 26 January 1942 on the cutter Feie with the aim of landing Rørholt south of Trondheim. The improvement in the weather had been minimal. It was freezing cold and the boat was battered by heavy seas. By the halfway mark, water had leaked into the fuel tanks, causing the engine to cut out repeatedly. At one point Larsen had to hoist canvas to make any progress while he carried out repairs. With the engine back in service they butted on. The motor cut out again. When he went to raise the sails they refused to budge. The rigging was solid with frozen spray. After more work on the engine it eventually spluttered into action and they finally reached the shore, numb, exhausted and seasick after thirty-six hours on the water.
They anchored in the lee of an island to wait for daylight. There they were discovered by some friendly fishermen who warned them that the Germans had set up a new control point on the route they had been planning to take. They changed their plans and diverted to an island farther south which was home to one of the Feie’s crewmen. His father had a boat there, which was well known in local waters. They could put Rørholt aboard and with luck he would be able to slip through the German control.
The new route would take them past another island where Larsen had previously landed an agent, who had been equipped with a transmitter. He was anxious to hear how he was getting on. They soon found the agent but he had bad news. He had failed to make any contact with Britain. He had come to the conclusion that the radio was faulty and had been trying to arrange a voyage back to Shetland.
Rørholt cast his expert eye over the set it but could not find the fault. He decided to try one of his own radios. Again, he failed to get a response on any of the agreed frequencies. The three of them came to the same dismaying conclusion. The radios were useless. They would have to go back.
There was no improvement in conditions on the voyage home. They struggled through heavy seas, nauseous from the motion of the ship and frozen stiff by the wind and flying spray. The engine played up constantly. They were blown off course and instead of making for Lerwick, Larsen decided it was easier to head for the haven of Lunna Voe. On 30 January the Feie made harbour in a snowstorm.
The failure had at least taught some lessons. The transmitters were too unwieldy and unreliable to justify the risks entailed in operating them. Rørholt remembered the miniaturized set he had seen his Polish colleagues experimenting with in London. ‘It had slightly less power than the others but it had an ingenious antenna arrangement which made up for it and it fitted in a briefcase of normal dimensions,’ he said. ‘However I had not been able to take that set as it was a prototype. Now I decided that I was definitely going to get that set and some others if possible. That was why my only concern when we reached Lunna was to get to London as quickly as possible.’
There were some bureaucratic difficulties in his way. Arriving in London, he was once again refused the use of the Polish transmitters. According to the subsequent legend, Rørholt decided simply to steal some of them. He returned to Shetland and on 11 February set off for Norway. Larsen was at the helm once more. This time he had a more reliable craft, the Arthur, which he had liberated to escape back to Shetland after a previous escapade. Rørholt was now ‘Rolf Christiansen’. There were two other agents making the trip, including Odd Sørli who would play a major role in the Tirpitz story. The crossing was rough but uneventful. On 13 February he arrived in the Trondheim area to begin his vital mission.
The dangers he faced were considerable. Ranged against him and the men he hoped to recruit was a strong force of professionals unconstrained by moral scruples, led by Gerhard Flesch. Flesch did not look or sound like the conventional image of a secret policeman. He had warm eyes and a mouth that in photographs seems always to be smiling. He was born in the city of Posen, the Polish Poznaá, in 1909, when it was still part of the German empire. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 while a law student. By 1936 he had joined the Gestapo and had the job of monitoring Germany’s religious sects. He was part of the organization that operated in the Sudetenland and later Bohemia and Moravia following their occupation. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939 he returned to his hometown where he was leader of an Einsatzkommando which started the work of exterminating the 3,000 or so Jews who still lived in the city.
Flesch had help from local collaborators. The most enthusiastic was Henry Rinnan. Rinnan belonged to the category of misfits and sociopaths to be found throughout the occupied territories for whom the arrival of the Nazis was a liberation. He was born into a poor family in Levanger, north of Trondheim, on 14 May 1915, the oldest of seven children. He was short, five feet three inches, and dark-haired, in a land of large, healthy blonds, which marked him out for ridicule and teasing. His early life was a story of disappointment and disgrace. He got a job working at his uncle’s petrol station but was sacked for stealing. He was twenty-one at the time, and married. To make restitution he was forced to sell all the household goods he had acquired on hire purchase. When the war began he tried to join the Finnish forces resisting the Soviet invasion but was turned down on the grounds of his puny physique. He served as a lorry driver in the Norwegian army, in April 1940 ferrying weapons around Trondheim. Two months later he was working as a car salesman.
The Germans had arrived in town and his employer gave a party to which some of them were invited. The invaders seemed friendly enough and Rinnan responded warmly. Three