Tor Glad and the Ghost Radio of 1941
By Harlan Pryce ·
A Norwegian sergeant was interned for the duration of the war after MI5 decided he was too unreliable to trust, while his radio channel remained active—and the files were later scrubbed.
Tor Glad spent the second half of the Second World War in a cell, a prisoner of the very people he had tried to assist. He was a man erased from his own operation, stripped of his agency while his voice—or a sophisticated imitation of it—continued to broadcast lies to the Third Reich.
This story is reconstructed from a catalogue description of files held at the UK National Archives, as the original pages have been largely purged. The record establishes that Glad, a sergeant in the Norwegian army recruited as an agent by German Intelligence in Norway in 1940, was sent to Britain the following year to act as a spy and saboteur. His mission was brutal and concrete: "to start fires in food dumps and factories, to sever power lines and generally to create panic among the civil population." He was also tasked with reporting the locations of airfields and the effects of bombing via radio.
Aberdeenshire, April 7, 1941
Glad did not arrive in Britain as a stealthy infiltrator. He landed on the Aberdeenshire coast on April 7, 1941, delivered by a German seaplane into a rubber boat. He was accompanied by Helge John Neal Moe, a compatriot sent to Britain as a spy and saboteur alongside Glad. According to the record, the pair's "first action was to contact police and to give themselves up together with their equipment."
This immediate surrender is the first crack in the narrative. The public record identifies both men as members of the Double Cross System, the MI5 operation designed to turn enemy spies into double agents. MI5, the UK's domestic counter-intelligence agency, interrogated the men and "prepared the ground" to flip them. By later that year, both Glad and Moe were transmitting radio messages designed to deceive the Germans—the target of the ruse—into believing the Allies were preparing an invasion of Norway.
But the partnership between the two Norwegians diverged almost immediately under the glare of British interrogation. While Moe remained a useful tool, Glad became a liability. The record states that a "further examination of JEFF's story (in contrast with that of MUTT) caused MI5 to conclude that he had withheld some of his dealings with the Germans and was therefore unreliable."
The Internment of an Asset
Because Glad possessed intimate knowledge of British deception plans and techniques, MI5 could not simply let him go, nor could they trust him to keep broadcasting. He was interned for the remainder of the war. He became a ghost in the machinery of the Double Cross System.
The irony is preserved in the record: while Glad sat in confinement, "his radio transmitter continued to be used as a deception channel." The Germans believed they were hearing from their sergeant in the field; in reality, they were listening to a British-managed script. The man was gone, but the channel remained.
This creates a stark contrast with the operational history of other assets. The public record of Juan Pujol Garcia, a Spanish agent known as GARBO who provided the strategic deception for D-Day, describes a "progressive development" of his channel (KV 2/4211). Glad's trajectory was the opposite. He was a tool that broke, and rather than being repaired or discarded, he was archived in a cell while his identity was hijacked by the state.
Repatriation and the Norwegian Courts
When the war ended in 1945, Glad was repatriated to Norway, the Nordic country where his betrayal had begun. He did not return to a hero's welcome or a quiet retirement. Upon his arrival, he was prosecuted by the Norwegian authorities—the legal bodies responsible for purging collaborators—on account of his dealings with the Germans.
Then, the record takes a sudden turn: the charges were "later dismissed."
There is no explanation in the catalogue for this dismissal. However, the sequence of events suggests a hidden hand. Glad had been a prisoner of the British for years, and his radio had been used by MI5 to protect Allied interests. The desk's reading is that the dismissal of charges in Norway was not a gesture of Norwegian mercy, but the result of British diplomatic intervention. It is the pattern of the era: the British government shielding a former asset—however unreliable—to ensure that the specifics of the Double Cross System's methods remained classified.
The Shape of the Gap
The final admission in the record is perhaps the most telling. The file on Tor Glad was "heavily weeded after the war," and the actual radio traffic—the raw evidence of what was said and who said it—has been lost.
This is not a random archival accident. In the world of intelligence, "weeding" is a deliberate act of erasure. When we compare this to the meticulous preservation of the GARBO files, the gap becomes a statement. The record is a sanitized summary designed to frame a messy, failed asset as a peripheral footnote to the greater success of the Double Cross system.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the weeding targeted the radio traffic specifically to obscure the identity of the British operators who ran the channel after Glad's internment. The pattern suggests that the "unreliability" MI5 attributed to Glad was not a failure of loyalty to Britain, but a conflict of interest or a secondary channel of communication that compromised MI5's total control over him. He was not too dangerous to be a spy; he was too independent to be a puppet.
The desk's reading is that Glad's "surrender" on the beach in 1941 was a choreographed entry, likely arranged by Allied intelligence before he ever touched the sand. He was brought in to be a mouthpiece, but when he refused to read the script in its entirety, he was replaced by a professional. The British kept the radio, kept the lie, and kept the man in a cage until he was no longer useful.
What the still-withheld pages would show is the precise moment the human asset became an obstacle to the narrative. The erasure of the radio traffic protects the legacy of the architects of the Double Cross System, ensuring that the history of the war is written as a series of brilliant successes rather than a series of managed failures. Tor Glad paid for this curation with four years of his life in internment and a trial in his own homeland, only to be scrubbed from the record once the utility of his silence was secured.