Mobilized for Propaganda: Danish Journalists in British Exile, 1940–1945

Abstract

This chapter sketches the activities of Danish journalists in British exile, 1940–1945 with a particular emphasis on their engagement with “propaganda”. Drawing on Danish private archives, and British official records, it analyses how these journalists were constantly obliged to negotiate contradictory legitimacies. Their professional identity as journalists became challenged by their obligation to serve British war propaganda and, conversely, to assist in the Danish exile community’s efforts to salvage Denmark’s international standing following the Danish “policy of negotiation” with Germany. It argues that due to a combination of the creativity of the journalists and the development of the war, they were able, during its last phase (1944–1945), to take on new roles as facilitators of a news and intelligence flow between London, Stockholm and Copenhagen.

Thank you for your last letter. I heard you on the BBC last night […]. It was delightful. You have a strange voice. Hoarse, but filled with fire, which produces a brilliant effect. I have been told that your 5 minutes are listened to in all of Denmark where they crave this sort of thing that we over here may find obvious or redundant. (Jens Gielstrup to Sven Tillge-Rasmussen, exiled Danish journalists in Britain, 1941)¹

During World War II about 25 journalists were active members of the Danish exile community in Britain. Some were stranded when the war began as correspondents for Danish newspapers. Others escaped to Britain during the war. All faced a unique challenge: their government had struck a deal with the Germans which put the country under military occupation while maintaining the formal independence of its political life, an arrangement that Danish historians have called “a fiction of sovereignty”.² Therefore, no Danish exiled government existed, in London or elsewhere, to rally expatriates to the cause, as in the case of most other occupied countries. The status of Danish citizens in Britain seemed ambiguous, and before 1943, when the Danish “policy of negotiation” partially collapsed, they even attracted suspicion. The stranded journalists were forced to think about their allegiances and were faced with the question of how they ought to reconcile their professional identity with their position as exiles in a country at war.

The experience of these journalists constitutes an overlooked chapter in the Scandinavian history of journalism and helps us to grasp the war as a link in the evolution of professional journalism in Northern Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the Danes, and some of their British contacts, have published accounts and memoirs.³ However useful, they are coloured by their retrospective glance and focus, for good reasons, on their stakes in the resistance movement at home. A few biographies exist of spectacular exiled figures, such as the controversial Danish ambassador to the USA, Henrik Kauffman and the politician at the centre of the London community John Christmas Møller.⁴ Jeremy Bennet’s important study of the BBC Danish Service illuminates the difficult working conditions of the Danes in adhering to changing British governmental directives and the demands of the improvised wartime news bureau Dansk Pressetjeneste (DPT) in Stockholm.⁵

Drawing on the personal papers and publications of these exiled journalists, this chapter sketches their practices with a special focus on their engagement with what at the time was referred to as “propaganda”. It focuses on their activities and movements rather than the content of what they wrote or broadcasted. Methodologically, I consider it a piece of transnational history of journalism.⁶ Sune Bechmann Pedersen and Marie Cronqvist have discussed the phenomenon of foreign correspondents having to act simultaneously as reporters and agents of states.⁷ Indeed, the exiled Danes had to navigate several state allegiances—one to British governmental agencies who employed them and another to an idea of a Free Denmark, which was not a government but which existed to salvage the country’s reputation nonetheless. At the same time, these journalists adhered to a nascent professional ethos: Michael Schudson has shown how “objectivity” and a sense of stewardship of democratic ideals emerged gradually throughout the late interwar period and towards the end of World War II.⁸ The question of how much Scandinavian foreign affairs journalists adhered to such ideals during wartime is complicated by historical variations in the development of media systems in Northern Europe and the Anglo-American world. However, journalism was undoubtedly emerging as a delimited professional field in Scandinavia at the time and was impacted by both French but predominantly Anglo-American traditions, considering journalism a commercial enterprise focused on newsgathering and involving early notions of objectivity.⁹ Our exiled journalists arguably navigated several legitimacies, one being an open-ended journalistic one which, rather than defining rigidly, we shall regard as simply a self-perception as journalists and trace by noting the connotations the exiled journalists attributed to it. This navigation will work as an analytical mainstay of the chapter, during which we shall also engage with the perception of propaganda by the journalists and what that activity entailed to them.

For reasons of clarity, the paper returns continuously to one journalist, Sten de Hemmer Gudme. Gudme has been chosen not with a biographical intention, but because his wartime trajectory offers insight into the main areas of activity of Danish exiled journalists: Initially struggling to find work, many joined the British in the BBC or in covert military propaganda between 1941 and 1943. After the fall of 1943, a combination of events in Denmark and a strained relationship with British leadership, the journalists shifted their efforts to public diplomacy. The emphasis was now on “selling” the Danish cause to the British public and also on the vital transfer of news and intelligence between Copenhagen, Stockholm and London, in which journalists were instrumental, the provision of reliable news being at the core of the journalistic tradecraft.

Before “zooming in” on Gudme, we examine the various institutions that Danes navigated in wartime Britain.

For Britain and for Denmark

Shortly after the occupation of Denmark in April 1940, Danes in Britain founded the Danish Council, which formalized the free Danish movement, paralleling movements like the Free French. Pledging to stand “with Great Britain and Northern Ireland for Denmark’s liberation”, the Council aligned itself with the British war effort, but its attitude towards the Danish government’s policy of negotiation with Germany was ambiguous. This was due to disagreements not only among the Danes but among the British too, whose governmental institutions differed internally in their policies towards Denmark. The British wanted to maintain control over information warfare aimed at Denmark, and strategists within both national groups feared that too heated criticism of the Danish government’s policy risked alienating the Danish population from its exiled compatriots.¹⁰

Thus, the Foreign Office (FO) instructed the Danes that their association must not resemble a government in exile challenging the legitimate one in Denmark.¹¹ The association had an executive council (the Council) representing Danes who lived in the UK, (their numbers are undetermined, but there were “6000–7000 in England”) and considered its most important function to be to “defend and explain” Denmark’s special position to their British hosts.¹²

Together with the Danish Club in London and the Anglo-Danish Society of Britain, the Council became a social epicentre for Danes in Britain.¹³ Its members, however, differed over questions of how close it should be to the British government and over its policy towards the Danish envoy in London, Count Edouard Reventlow, who between 1940 and 1941 was considered by many as too prudent—or even cowardly—in his allegiance to official Danish policy.¹⁴ The conservative politician John Christmas Møller escaped to Britain in 1942 and became, after some compromise with the existing leadership, the leader of the Council.¹⁵ Invited by the British government, Møller brought dynamism to the Council but also gradually soured against his hosts.¹⁶ The journalists, meanwhile, worked consistently to promote the Danish Council to the British public, mainly through the Council’s newspaper aimed at the exile community, Frit Danmark, but also other smaller outlets and books, pamphlets, exhibitions, talks and events. For reasons of space, however, the present chapter focuses on the activities the Danes engaged in vis-à-vis Scandinavia and particularly those under British direction (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Danish exiled journalist Sten Gudme (left), UK Deputy Prime Minister Clement Atlee (middle) and exiled Danish politician John Christmas Møller (right) at a Danish exhibition in London, 1944. From the Photo Collections of the Royal Danish Library

Most of the journalists worked for the BBC, from whose Danish Service they broadcast to occupied Denmark. The headquarters in the stately Bush House in central London became a pillar in the London of exiles where the Danes mingled with expatriate Europeans of many kinds, from journalists to politicians, diplomats, spies, civil servants, former officials of the League of Nations and so on.¹⁷ After the first improvised message to the Danish people on the evening of the occupation (by Sven Tillge-Rasmussen, London correspondent for the daily Politiken), the Danish Service transmitted news and talks daily throughout the war. Most of the journalist community worked for the BBC, although to quite different degrees, some working as permanent newsreaders, some as commentators and some as monitors.¹⁸ The Danish Service’s director, at the insistence of the British who wanted close supervision, was Robert Jørgensen, a British citizen with a Danish background who had a career in advertising and little journalistic experience.

Through the BBC, Danes would encounter the third and more mysterious platform that employed exiled journalists. British war propaganda operated through three ministries, namely the FO, the Ministry of Economic Warfare (which oversaw the infamous Special Operations Executive, SOE, tasked with paradropping trained exiles to facilitate sabotage), and the Ministry of Information. After the escalation of power struggles between these three ministries, a compromise was reached in late 1941 to create a single amalgamated clandestine organization tasked with targeting occupied and enemy countries with propaganda. This body was called the Political Warfare Executive, (PWE).¹⁹ It supervised the BBC, together with the FO and its Political Intelligence Department (PID).²⁰

On the topic of propaganda, a brief historicization and discussion of this concept is worthwhile: Scholarship has argued that the concept of propaganda in Western countries was “theorized” as a problematic activity tied to the development of a mass society as far back as the late eighteenth century and did not, as is often assumed, emerge suddenly as part of Europe’s therapeutic dealing with the shock of “total war” in 1918. At the end of the interwar period propaganda, although regularly used interchangeably with “publicity”, was increasingly becoming reserved for describing a wartime measure. It could, in short, be legitimate under the right circumstances, but among people who had grown up during World War I, and arguably among journalists in particular, it would signify aggressive use of information to manipulate the masses. In this chapter, the word is used because the actors themselves (British intelligence agents and Danish exiled journalists alike) used it systematically to describe their own work, be it covert or overt. Its use by the author therefore does not reflect a value judgement, but rather a reflection of the discourse at the time, in line with the volume’s ambition to pursue an interrogation of the concept’s use and meaning over time.²¹

We observe at least three legitimacies open to the stranded Danish journalists: they could attempt to remain loyal towards the Danish representatives in Britain and only pursue work that was equally acceptable to these and to the British, such as working at the Danish Legation, or taking work outside journalism.²² Conversely, they could join British governmental war propaganda which would subjugate them to the British authorities. Finally, they could try to maintain a journalistic ethos of producing reliable news in times of war. Arguably, the complete maintenance of any or all of these three legitimacies proved next to impossible, and thus their wartime trajectory may be observed as an ongoing negotiation between them (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Picture taken during the “London blitz”, the first German air raids on London in September 1940. From New York Times Paris Bureau Collection/ Wikimedia Commons

“Richard Stone” the Propagandist

One day during the summer of 1941, a man walked into Bush House which, aside from the BBC, hosted the newspaper of the Danish exile community, Frit Danmark. The newspaper’s editor, Emil Blytgen-Petersen had been confidentially told that Sten de Hemmer Gudme, a 40-year-old journalist at the Danish daily Politiken, had fled Denmark via Sweden and was coming to Britain. Gudme had spent at least a month in the English countryside before he was allowed to go to London and show himself to the rest of the exile community.²³

Gudme had been invited by the British intelligence services via Ebbe Munck, a Danish journalist based in Stockholm, and a key facilitator-to-be of the Danish resistance movement, who worked together with the SOE representatives in the Swedish capital. The request for a talented Danish journalist to go to England came from Thomas Barman, a Norwegian-born agent of the PID.²⁴ Since his own days as Times correspondent in Scandinavia, Barman had counted Danish foreign affairs journalists among his friends. Gudme, who was unmarried and had no children, was willing to go. His friend and colleague at Politiken Erik Seidenfaden wrote enviously in a private note about a month after Gudme’s departure from Stockholm on a British military plane: “Gudme left for London on 20 May. War has broken out between Germany and Russia. Nobody can leave Denmark now. [Ebbe Munck] wrote today that various candidates were proposed, but that he had decided on Sten because he was independent. Lucky man!”²⁵

After his escape, which brought German wrath upon his editor-in-chief in Copenhagen, who only just managed to keep his job, Gudme wrote in a farewell note to Seidenfaden and his wife Jytte: “not for a single moment have I regretted my decision, and I look forward to doing the job, whatever it may be”. Arguably, Gudme was thinking first and foremost of doing something that would help the British war effort and thereby legitimize his voyage.²⁶

On arrival he was installed in a village close to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, north of London, which had become the headquarters of the PWE. Here, citizens of all occupied countries in Europe were tasked with counselling the British on strategy for each country, producing leaflets and making broadcasts from “black transmitters”, disguised as messages from partisans in the occupied country.²⁷ Gudme was ordered to take a false name and chose “Richard Stone”. He was united with fellow Danes Terkel M. Terkelsen and Jens Gielstrup (see the opening epigraph), who desperately needed news from Denmark. It was they, together with Sven Tillge-Rasmussen, who had asked Barman to procure a Dane for them with fresh news.²⁸ Gielstrup and Tillge-Rasmussen were former colleagues of Gudme’s at Politiken, while Terkelsen came from Berlingske Tidende.

Terkelsen was establishing himself as an arbiter between the interests of the British war effort and his own countrymen.²⁹ In January 1941 he had been asked to join the Enemy Propaganda Department, often referred to metonymously by its placement, “Electra House”, which was later to merge into the PWE.³⁰ Together with two Brits, Brinley Thomas (PWE) and Barman (PID), he would become responsible for directions to his Danish colleagues in the BBC.³¹ Gudme was appointed to lead the Danish Section at Woburn Abbey. Gielstrup, who had left a career as a promising novelist and poet in Denmark, and a Danish military officer, Eyvind Knauer were speakers at the Danish transmitter there, while Terkelsen and Tillge-Rasmussen were editors and consultants.³²

“Zooming out”, we observe that after Denmark’s occupation in April 1940, correspondents for Danish papers had lost their jobs and were catapulted into financial uncertainty. They still earned their money in journalistic work, albeit rather menial compared to their former glory as national correspondents. Terkelsen monitored Danish radio for the BBC, Tillge-Rasmussen and Emil Blytgen-Petersen both corresponded for newspapers in neutral Sweden. Other Danes joined the ranks of what would become a journalist community in Britain, like the young communist and former expatriate salesman Leif Gundel, who talked his way into a job at the BBC.³³ The Danish Council had little insight into events in Denmark, and a general feeling of isolation permeated the Danish “colony”.³⁴

Then, in the spring of 1941, all this started to change as a number of the Danes were handpicked to serve British war propaganda. Several were already working at the BBC, but Gudme, Gielstrup, Tillge-Rasmussen and Terkelsen, together with Harry Agerbak who came later, joined the PWE in Bedfordshire and were singled out by Barman, in his memoirs, as “among the best of our colleagues”. Barman added that Gudme “ultimately played a leading part in the lay-out of all propaganda-leaflets, regardless of language, dropped by the RAF [(Royal Air Force)]”.³⁵

A letter from Gudme to his old friend Seidenfaden from May 1943 is telling as to the degree to which Gudme had settled into his role as propagandist two years after his arrival. Seidenfaden had remarked critically on the propaganda that was coming from England (it was unclear whether he meant BBC broadcasts or printed propaganda) and had called it “more German than English” in its style. Gudme responded quite passionately: “I cannot see the problem in certain kinds of propaganda using harsher methods”. And he added:

Dear God, did one ever hear of a more difficult country than Denmark in terms of propaganda! If one calls the Germans stupid bastards, they [the Danes] think one is an idiot, because they know that much better themselves, and the Germans are not even angry because they know it themselves too.³⁶

Gudme now legitimized his work as necessary for the war effort. He added, however, that he had passed on Seidenfaden’s remarks to Barman and to the FO. And in the longer run the criticism may have resonated with his own doubts. Gudme and Tillge-Rasmussen both stopped working at Woburn in September 1943, around the time when the Danish policy of collaboration collapsed after uprisings brought about by increased German pressure. Gudme went to devote his time to the Danish Council. He would replace Emil Blytgen-Petersen as editor of Frit Danmark when the latter went to Normandy to report from the Allied invasion in 1944.³⁷ Tillge-Rasmussen left to become an attaché at the Danish Legation, a role distinctly removed from war propaganda.³⁸

Primarily, it seems Gudme and Tillge-Rasmussen’s exit from war propaganda reflected events in Denmark. With a more unified home front (the Freedom Council which coordinated the Danish resistance fight had been founded in September), they probably felt more needed elsewhere. Still, Gudme wrote later that he “broke with the British on political questions” suggesting that something more than a change in priorities was at stake.³⁹ A few weeks before, on 23 August, Tillge-Rasmussen’s young assistant Jens Gielstrup, who had struggled to be allowed to fly for the RAF, was killed in one of his first operations as a Spitfire pilot, the training for which had taken him away from Woburn since the autumn of 1941. However, although Gielstrup’s death shocked his colleagues, nothing suggests that it caused their exit.

Gudme has later been described as a man who only reluctantly spoke of his own work.⁴⁰ He seemed keen on keeping up the appearance of a smooth cooperation with the British authorities. A few months after he left Woburn, he travelled to Sweden on a mission which was, he wrote later, “initiated by the British”. However, the minutes of the Information Committee of the Danish Council state that the mission was initiated from there, and that the Council had to “sell” it to the British.⁴¹ In fact, Gudme was able to go because of having successfully played two British institutions against each other. His employers in the PID and PWE were unwilling to let him go, but the SOE, a more activist organization pushing for more British action in Scandinavia, secured his permit. In the minutes of a joint meeting between the three organizations, a PID official notes the:

surprising decision of S.O.E Danish section to recommend to the Foreign Office that Mr. Sten Gudme (a former employee of the black side of PWE Danish work) should be granted an exit permit to go over to Stockholm to traffic with the Danish press service on behalf of the Free Danes. I have asked for an explanation of this strange affair.⁴²

Thus, the reasons for Gudme and Tillge-Rasmussen’s change of heart seem connected to a combination of frustrated patriotism and a general fatigue with taking orders from the British. In an August 1942 memo signed by Gudme, Tillge-Rasmussen, Eyvind Knauer and Møller, the exiled politician, the signatories criticized the British policy of not encouraging active resistance, a reluctance the Danes believed risked undermining the work of agents in Denmark, and which could unfairly result in “leaving Denmark worse off than other occupied countries” when the war ended.⁴³

The British largely ignored the memo and Terkelsen, significantly, did not sign it—he probably preferred to remain a loyal employee of the British, as has been noted too by Frank Esmann.⁴⁴ The memo seems to reflect a move away from legitimizing their presence in Britain through their devotion to the British war effort. By 1943, some of the Danes felt confident in trying to secure a more independent agency as journalists working under special circumstances.

A Triangular Trade of News and Intelligence

Arguably, some of the most important work performed by the London journalists was their channelling of news and intelligence between the capitals of Denmark, Sweden and Great Britain. This marks the latest phase of their activities, 1944–1945, when German defeats meant the Swedish government no longer seriously feared Reich repercussions for harbouring a Danish exile community, and the Danish government consisted of civil servants many of which were sympathetic to resistance efforts. A show of force was being prepared between resistance groups, the “old politicians” who had governed Denmark during the war and key figures of the exile communities like Kauffman and Møller.

The process of smuggling information, including news on resistance activities or intelligence from political circles, out via Sweden to Britain to either be broadcast back to Denmark by the BBC or Woburn or to benefit British intelligence, made for an elaborate role for journalists, whose capabilities as conveyors of reliable information became pertinent. After the war Gudme, together with Erling Bjøl and a Swedish journalist, contributed to a booklet by Stockholm Dane Gunnar Næsselund in which they wrote that:

The Danish Council and the individual journalists became tasked with establishing lines of communication with those back home. This depended necessarily on a close relationship with the British—and later the British-American—agencies that oversaw information from Denmark and that controlled the channels through which information had to pass. In the first few years very few in Denmark—you could count them on one hand—understood the significance of sending good political reports and news to England, and who were willing to run the personal risk it entailed.⁴⁵

Here it is seen how, in retrospect, journalists who had spent the war in Stockholm and London alike were keen to highlight their use of a journalistic skillset in the fight against the Nazis.

In Stockholm, activities intensified from August 1943 and a surge of refugees, including Jews escaping a German internment operation in October and resistance fighters with their covers blown or prominent anti-Nazis, came to Sweden. The relatively small exile community in Stockholm, headed by Ebbe Munck, became overworked, and the city became a hub of post-war planning and intelligence gathering.⁴⁶

When Gudme had left Stockholm back in May 1941, he had trodden a path that would be used regularly during the later war years. The first to repeat his journey was Møller, exactly a year later. Then followed journalists Ole Kiilerich and Holger Hørsholt-Hansen in February 1943, Harry Agerbak in November 1943, Erling Bjøl in February 1944 and Johannes G. Sørensen in December 1944. Ebbe Munck too visited London in mid-1944.⁴⁷

The route worked the other way as well. In August 1943, exiled journalists in Stockholm founded the news bureau Dansk Pressetjeneste (Danish Press Service, DPT). The DPT relied on informers in Denmark (notably the underground news bureau Information, which transformed, after the war, into a non-communist left-wing daily newspaper) and evolved into the paramount provider of Danish news to international media from the autumn of 1943. Its leadership was a triumvirate of Ebbe Munck, Gunnar Næsselund and Erik Seidenfaden, all journalists, and with a Swede playing the part of director to adhere to Swedish law.⁴⁸ The two exile communities now realized the importance of striking a deal that provided London with DPT news and intelligence for the BBC and for British governmental agencies, and simultaneously let Stockholm Danes have a say in its use. Reckless use of confidential news could compromise the safety of Danish officials helping the resistance and undermine the credibility of the DPT, which also serviced Swedish news media through the Tidningarnes Telegrambureau (TT).⁴⁹

Gudme was crucial in negotiating the details of these connections. As already referred to, on 24 November 1943, the Council’s Information Committee deliberated about sending him to Sweden to negotiate “a direct news service from Stockholm to the […] Committee”.⁵⁰ Gudme left in December, and for two months he negotiated with the DPT and also interviewed Danish resistance fighters and prominent refugees in the Swedish capital. He sent intelligence reports to Møller in London, to the PID and to Danish legations elsewhere.⁵¹ Upon returning, in February 1944, he briefed British government agencies on Scandinavian developments.⁵²

Despite the breakthrough, all was still not sorted. As discussed by Bennet, a crisis between the BBC and the DPT, which gives some insight into the conditions of the relationship, erupted in late June 1944. The Stockholm journalists accused the BBC Danes of making poor use of DPT telegrams, the content of which informers had risked their lives for. Consequently, they stopped all further news flows to London to exert maximum pressure on the British.⁵³ Erling Bjøl acted as a London informant for the DPT and, in letters to Stockholm, blamed Robert Jørgensen, the BBC’s British-Danish director.⁵⁴ However, Bennet argues convincingly that the DPT’s distrust in Jørgensen was largely unjustified, because the Stockholm Swedes were ignorant of the degree of British (PWE) control of the BBC. The British, after some resistance, agreed to reform their policy and allow more space for local Danish news. The Danes in Stockholm and London, although still having their work framed to a large degree by British demands, had won a victory by securing more freedom in the use of their news provision and thus a more clear-cut journalistic role for themselves.

Gudme’s importance in bridging Stockholm and London worldviews is suggested by the fact that about a year after his return to England, Stockholm wanted him back. Gudme wanted to stay in London but acquiesced when Seidenfaden wrote to him: “I think it will be of great value both for London and for the Cause [sic] if there was a man here who knew how things stand on your side”.⁵⁵ So, in December 1944, Gudme left Britain and settled in Stockholm for the rest of the war. At this point, his brother Peter Gudme, a leading force in Information in Denmark, had killed himself whilst in the custody of Gestapo in Copenhagen. Evidence of how this impacted the closed-off Sten Gudme is glimpsed in his papers—for example, in a report to Møller in January 1945 he referred to the Germans as “huns”, a derogatory (and quite British) kind of slang he had not used before.⁵⁶ He also seems to have intensified his work. In late 1944, he became a member of the Liaison Committee between the Freedom Council, representing the Danish resistance movement, and the politicians (Kontaktudvalget).⁵⁷

Gudme was not the only contributor to this triangular movement of news and intelligence across the North Sea. Looking solely at journalists based in London, the late arrivals Ole Kiilerich and Erling Bjøl both acted as liaison officers between Stockholm and London, and Terkelsen, as we have seen, supported the activities from the PID.⁵⁸ When Bjøl wanted to go to London in 1944, the British refused, saying he was of better use to them in Stockholm. Bjøl then secured a permit for England from his American employers at the United Press, a move which provoked the British to arrest him upon arrival and place him briefly in a screening camp. He later went over to the BBC, orchestrated by none other than Gudme, who wanted people there who had been in occupied Denmark. Danes were capable of manoeuvring between the interests of the Great Powers to increase their agency as wartime journalists.⁵⁹

Conclusion

This chapter has sketched the figures and practices of the exile community of Danish journalists in Britain from 1940 to 1945, with a special emphasis on their endeavours inside British-run war propaganda agencies and their struggle to gain independent agency within this framework. Throughout the war, the conditions that the British laid down for them and the realities of the Danish policy of negotiation very much shaped the ways the exiled journalist worked.

They never served a legitimate Danish government in exile and were therefore forced to constantly navigate three interdependent yet different legitimacies: one drawing on their nationality, one on their devotion to the British war effort and one on their own skillsets as journalists. First, a handpicked group assisted the PWE with targeting Denmark with covert or “black” propaganda, but over time, the ambiguous caution of British policy and the lack of influence given to the Danes on strategy drove the most experienced journalists to grow weary of British oversight. Helped by parallel developments in Scandinavia, including the partial collapse of the Danish government’s policy of collaboration with the German occupiers and the mounting confidence of exiled Danes in Sweden and of Swedish authorities in helping them, the London Danes were increasingly able to manipulate their British supervisors to give them more agency and thus were able to pursue a new role towards the end of the war (1944–1945) as facilitators of a transfer of news and political intelligence between London, Stockholm and Copenhagen.