Gunvald Tomstad

Gunvald Jørg Tomstad (2 August 1918 – 12 May 1970) was a major agent of the British SIS, and a Norwegian resistance member during World War II. From 1941 to 1943, he was a mole or double agent while also operating a clandestine radio transmitter in the Flekkefjord area. These were two of the most dangerous roles in that war.

Tomstad was born in Nes, Vest-Agder as a son of a young farmer and journalist. His father died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, so he and his sisters were raised mainly by their maternal grandparents. In addition to working as a farmer, he was a typographer in the newspaper Agder, until the newspaper was closed due to the German occupation of Norway. He was recruited for the British SIS by a group of agents, led by Odd Starheim and despatched by Winston Churchill before he became Prime Minister.

The Norwegian agents recruited by this team had two main tasks. They were to set up a group of coast watchers to monitor German naval activity, and establish liaison with Scandinavian nuclear physicists (Niels Bohr and colleagues), potentially associated with a German atom bomb project. Gunvald Tomstad already possessed an unregistered home-made ham radio transmitter (now an exhibit at the resistance museum in Oslo), and was thus selected to act as the primary contact with SIS operations in the United Kingdom. The operation was sponsored by the SIS, but was later required to assist the newly formed Special Operations Executive (SOE). SIS leaders were opposed to cooperation with SOE, which they believed would compromise their main mission of gathering intelligence. This fear was realized in an abortive SOE operation (below) that led to the loss of their prime double-agent in occupied Norway.

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