Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  Before taking the train out to Essex from Liverpool Street, Neave made his way down the Strand and into Fleet Street, making for Farrar’s Building in the Temple where he had been a pupil in chambers before the war. He discovered the Temple Church in ruins, and his old offices badly damaged, but found the old clerk Charles Hiscocks still installed in his brief-cluttered room. Hiscocks turned pale when Neave appeared at the door: ‘You can’t come in here, sir! You’re supposed to be dead!’

  Neave travelled back to Ingatestone in company with Newman through the familiar Essex suburbs. They exchanged few words, the scenery passing as in a dream. The station features appeared as ‘faint images’ to Neave, who left a poignant recollection of his homecoming. ‘My father was alone on the platform. I walked up to him and we said nothing for a moment. It was not a time for words. No sentence which I could have selected would have seemed appropriate. I shook hands with the stationmaster, and then I was in the car travelling through the hedgerows until we came to the white gates of Mill Green Park.’2

  It was also a time for some mild self-indulgence. His army back pay had been accumulating in the bank throughout his incarceration and he now had money to spend. Neave went window-shopping in St James’s Street, as a man about town would, with £20 burning a hole in his pocket. He bought tobacco and cigars and ordered himself two expensive shirts. Then, on 26 May 1942, ten days after his return to London and the second anniversary of his capture at Calais, he presented himself in his new captain’s uniform at Broadway Buildings, a discreet stone building crammed between the Old Star and Crown pub and offices in Broadway, opposite St James’s Park underground station. This was the headquarters of MI6, alias the Secret Intelligence Service, headed by the formidable Colonel Claude Dansey. Neave reported to his boss, Colonel Jimmy Langley, in Room 900, which turned out to be a tiny office that had formerly been used to make the tea in. Initially, the two of them formed the entire complement of IS9 (Intelligence School 9) and it never numbered more than four officers. It was primarily concerned with facilitating escape and evasion by Allied servicemen and worked directly with Crockatt who operated from MI9 headquarters in Beaconsfield, the Buckinghamshire town where Neave had spent much of his childhood. Langley explained that Room 900 was subject to ‘dual control’ by MI9 and the Secret Service. Neave gave little away during his lifetime about this close connection with MI6, but he did write a first-person piece in the Observer in 1974 in which he said: ‘The latter [SIS] supplied communications and training facilities for agents that were paid for by MI9, our nominal employers.’3 His use of the word ‘nominal’ clearly indicates that his real employers were MI6, and from this time forward he was a member of the intelligence community, from which there is no retirement.

  On his first day, Neave described being summoned into the presence of Dansey, a bald, iron-jawed man who shot him a freezing glance and growled: ‘These escape lines are very dangerous.’ His new captain was well aware of that, having been passed through their hands across Occupied Europe, but Dansey meant the danger that the ratlines might pose to his military intelligence units. The SIS chief illustrated his point by arguing that the First World War heroine Nurse Edith Cavell should not have compromised her information-gathering work in Brussels by hiding escaped British soldiers in her clinic. Neave, who had firsthand experience of the courage of young women on the escape routes, bridled. Dansey, he felt, did Nurse Cavell an injustice. She had been shot for harbouring prisoners and she had not been a spy. A generation later, her legend was still inspiring nurses that she had trained to work for the escape lines in Belgium. In Neave’s view the motives that made men and women help evaders on the run were quite different from, and often superior to, those of professional spies. Dansey singled out one agent, a young Belgian woman named Dédée, about whom he entertained doubts, though by that stage she had already brought out thirty British servicemen into neutral Spain. He lectured Neave on the need to recruit couriers and train them in codes and wireless communication. Finally, he declared sarcastically that all the escape lines in Occupied Europe were ‘blown’ and known to the Germans. With a final grimace, the downbeat briefing was brought to a close and Neave was back in the corridor. ‘I was dismayed by his attitude,’ he confessed later. ‘In war and peace one cannot be too careful about security. But his harsh judgements were difficult to accept. I thought of those who had risked their lives to get me back to England.’4

  Deflated by his encounter with Dansey, Neave returned to Room 900 to begin his secret work. His first task was to choose a codename, and for the next three years he became ‘Saturday’, though the War Office assigned him other names, including Anthony Newton. Langley showed him the files, which confirmed Neave’s impression that, though small, MI9 was a professional operation. As early as July 1940, only a fortnight after the fall of France, it had set up the escape line through the Iberian peninsula, to the benefit of the many British soldiers who had not got away at Dunkirk and had then poured down into Vichy France.

  MI9 was nothing if not original in the way it operated. Lacking local contacts in the South of France, the organisation sent out Nubar Gulbenkian, son of the hugely rich and well-connected oil billionaire Calouste Gulbenkian, together with his valet, first to Lisbon then Barcelona and on to southern France to set up the evasion and escape lines. Being an Iranian diplomat, he could travel unhindered, and the Gulbenkian mission was highly successful. In Marseilles, Captain Ian Garrow of the Seaforth Highlanders played the role of ‘stay behind’ organiser brilliantly, recruiting among others Louis Nouveau, who had set up Neave’s escape. Throughout 1941, MI9, manned only by a handful of officers, perfected its operations, bringing dozens of men back through Spain to Gibraltar. There, like Neave, they were briefly interrogated before being sent back home to continue the war. Some were also interviewed by MI9 in a first-floor flat in London’s clubland. The flat, No. 5 St James’s Street, opposite Prunier’s, the fish restaurant, was Jimmy Langley’s home. It was here that Neave and Langley met returned POWs and interviewed likely recruits to be sent into the field as agents of Room 900.

  Neave’s life now fell into a more regular pattern. In June 1942, he rented a flat in Elizabeth Street, Belgravia. It was, he mused, accommodation ‘fit for Bertie Wooster with twentyish furniture’. He lived the life of a man about town here for six months, passing the evenings drinking whisky and talking tactics with Langley, ever alert for a telegram or phone call that would recall them urgently to Room 900 to hear of another batch of escapers. ‘It did not seem a soldier’s life,’ he reflected later. ‘Sometimes I felt, thinking of those I had left behind in Colditz, that I had no right to this luxury.’5

  However, the intense period of MI9’s activity was only just beginning. While Neave had been hiding in Marseilles, Langley, Darling and O’Leary had met in Gibraltar to plan a big upgrading of the escape effort. Before they could implement these plans, however, they had to try to eliminate a traitor on the ratlines, Harold Cole, an army sergeant in his late thirties, who was masquerading as a captain. The British police knew him as a small-time crook, with a string of convictions for housebreaking and fraud. He had absconded from the British Expeditionary Force with the sergeants’ mess funds just before the battle for Dunkirk and mysteriously reappeared as a courier in the Allied escape routes from Lille and Paris over the demarcation line. Cole was a womaniser and was suspected of using escape funds to promote his disreputable lifestyle. But much worse, he was also a traitor, a double agent who betrayed to the Gestapo an estimated 150 French men and women working for the Allies, to save his own skin. Cole was eventually cornered in a Marseilles flat but escaped through a bathroom window to continue his ruinous treachery. He was later jailed by the Vichy regime for spying. At the end of the war he was still on the run, posing as a British intelligence officer in the American zone. The British had him arrested and he was returned to Paris in the custody of the Americans. Cole escaped yet again and hid with a woman friend, but neighbours informed on him as
a suspected deserter and he opened fire on two gendarmes sent to arrest him. He wounded one, but was shot dead by the other. Neave regarded Cole as one of the most selfish and callous traitors ever to serve the enemy in time of war.

  Room 900 struggled against official indifference to its work. Until the summer of 1942, organised evasion was a low-ranking priority with the RAF, without whose cooperation they could not parachute wireless agents into enemy territory. They were also short of funds, until Room 900 discovered a Mr Gosling, a local manager of the British textile firm, J. & P. Coates, who was hiding in southern France with six million French francs belonging to his company. MI9 arranged to credit the firm in London, while the ‘Gosling millions’ financed its operations for more than a year. One of its highest profile escapers was Whitney Straight, the American racing driver, who was rescued with thirty aircrew from a beach near Perpignan in late July 1942. Similar operations in September and October netted more than a hundred other escapers. MI9 was in business.

  Neave’s work had another, less flamboyant, dimension. He was tasked with interrogating Allied nationals fleeing their Nazi-dominated homeland. The grillings took place at the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for the Orphan Daughters of Soldiers and Sailors killed in the Crimean War (the RVPS), a grim building in Clapham, south London, built in 1857. In 1939 it was commandeered as the MI5 Interrogation Centre for non-British arrivals. Here, enemy agents were sometimes exposed, ‘broken down, so I supposed by endless cups of War Office tea’, Neave observed later. After questioning, Room 900 could pluck their recognised agents from this forbidding place and whisk them off to safe houses for hot baths and the best food that rationing would allow. Here, Neave went to identify Louis Rémy, a Belgian air force officer who had swum the Bay of Algeciras to seek sanctuary in Gibraltar. Fortunately, Neave could identify him as an ex-inmate of Colditz.

  There were other surprises too, among them Leoni Savinos and his German Communist wife, whom Neave had met in Marseilles in his transit through the Pat line, and who came through the processing machine of the RVPS. (Leoni had at that time been introduced to Neave as Timon.) A bewildered Neave took the couple to dinner in London in August 1942, reflecting that the underground movement defied all ideological barriers. ‘There were no politics in this humane form of warfare,’ he deliberated. He was to show much less sympathy for the left in post-war years. Savinos and his wife had to be extracted from under the noses of the Gestapo, who arrested him in Paris on a mercy mission for the escape lines. The Nazis threatened to take Madame Savinos hostage unless he agreed to work for the Germans. Savinos agreed to spy on the escape lines, but unbeknown to the Gestapo he acted as a double agent for the Allies. He and his wife were brought out in a Room 900 sea operation and Savinos returned to Europe for the SOE in 1943.

  Throughout the winter of 1942, the Pat line continued to bring out escaping servicemen on the route followed by Neave, despite the German occupation of Vichy France on 30 November. In its heyday, the line had hundreds of people working for it, bringing Allied aircrew and soldiers back from collection points in northern France. Room 900 had regular radio contact through a courageous young Australian operator, Tom Groome. Yet over the operations hung the spectre of the double agent Harold Cole. When conditions became too hot, Louis Nouveau, who had sheltered Neave, closed down his safe house in Marseilles early in 1943 and took over the Paris end under an assumed name. Activities were moved to Toulouse. Conscious that the net was tightening, Neave and Langley hatched plans to extricate key operatives. Ian Garrow, the founder of the Marseilles group, was snatched from Fort Meauzac prison camp. Like Neave, he walked out in enemy uniform, on this occasion as a French gendarme. Garrow escaped through Spain, but safely back in Neave’s Elizabeth Street flat he warned that Cole’s treachery had put the entire organisation at risk. His alarm was fully justified. First, Groome was captured while sending a radio message from a remote farmhouse; then Nouveau was arrested bringing five airmen through the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris. Finally, O’Leary himself was picked up by the Gestapo on 20 March 1943 and Neave’s most efficient evade and escape system was in ruins. His best agents disappeared into Nazi concentration camps and the Germans tried, without success, to use Groome and the captured radio set to deceive Neave and Langley into sending further air drops and agents into southern France. The Pat line ceased to exist, though it had helped more than 600 Allied servicemen to their freedom. The price paid was heavy. Over a hundred brave helpers were gaoled, some paying the ultimate price. O’Leary himself survived three concentration camps, and Nouveau lived through the horrors of Buchenwald.

  Back in London in Room 900, Neave was distraught. Rival services, never slow to criticise MI9, heaped scorn on their efforts. ‘For many weeks, Langley and I lived under a cloud until we almost believed that we were solely responsible,’ he later confessed.6 Neave blamed higher authorities for refusing to sanction more agents and radio transmitters. The need for MI9 was greater than ever, he reasoned. The big RAF raids on Germany were under way, and the number of crews shot down and evading capture had increased proportionately. It was very expensive to train fresh crews, and therefore cost-effective to bring back as many of the downed airmen as possible. Moreover, the impact on morale of a flying officer shot down over the Continent later walking back into his aerodrome mess was enormous, as Neave could personally testify. These comebacks also persuaded aircrew to take evasion and escape more seriously, with a consequent rise in success rates.

  Nonetheless, Neave conceded that they had made mistakes. Their organisation was unlike any orthodox security service. It dealt with men on the run, using civilian helpers and impromptu systems of escape. There was much enthusiasm but not enough professionalism. The early escape lines had grown too quickly, weakening security and making the organisation more vulnerable to infiltration by the Germans. The rolling-up of the Pat line forced a major rethink of strategy. As the war went into its third year, MI9 was sending in agents to create smaller groups of helpers tasked with specific evacuations, by land, sea and even light plane. Sitting in Room 900, Neave never ceased to be amazed at the courage of local civilian volunteers. He was now responsible for the Comet line, started in 1941 by a petite young Belgian, Andrée de Jongh, a schoolmaster’s daughter from Brussels. Known invariably by the diminutive ‘Dédée’, she began by bringing two Belgians and a British soldier over the Pyrenees on foot, presenting them to an astonished consul at Bilbao. He put her in touch with ‘Monday’, the Madrid embassy attaché Michael Creswell, and so began one of the most daring and successful collaborations of the war. Dédée insisted on running her own operation, funded by MI9. ‘It was an informal, even high-spirited escape line and she wanted it that way,’ he conceded. ‘She did not like to be regarded as a spy.’7 Her youthful but nonetheless effective methods were difficult for the old War Office intelligence establishment to stomach (as suggested by Dansey’s doubts about her) but the airmen she rescued were often moved to tears by her courage. She was being sought by the Gestapo, along with her father Frédéric, who had also joined the cause. The numbers of Allied airmen passing along the Comet line rose exponentially as the saturation bombing of Germany and the occupied territories intensified. In all, 337 crews of all Allied nations were rescued in this way. Neave could not repress his admiration for the ‘little cyclones’, as he called his women volunteers. One, Madame Elvire de Greef (codename Tante Go, after her pet dog), enlisted her entire family. Her husband Fernand, an interpreter at the local Kommandantur, stole identity cards and passes, and her son and daughter acted as couriers. She and his other little cyclones were ‘wonderful examples of the triumph of willpower and feminine subtlety’, he wrote later.8

  The war brought many women into positions where their courage was tested and often found to be at least as good as that of men, but Neave felt he had experienced something special. He visited his former agents after the war and devoted his second book, Little Cyclone, published in 1954, to them. On the title page, he quoted
from the last stanza of Wordsworth’s ‘She Was a Phantom of Delight’:

  The reason firm, the temperate will,

  Endurance, foresight, strength and skill;

  A perfect Woman; nobly planned,

  To warn, to comfort, and command.

  He made little of it in his books but Neave had quickly found such a woman – Diana Giffard – at a party soon after his fateful meeting with Crockatt at Rules. Diana was a member of one of England’s oldest families. An ancestor, Sire de Longueville, came with William the Conqueror in 1066 and later took the name of Giffard. It was love, if not at first, then at third sight, for after meeting her only three times Neave proposed and was accepted. They married on 29 December 1942 at the parish church of Brewood, Staffordshire, near her family home, Chillington Hall. He was twenty-six, she was twenty-three. He gave his occupation as captain in His Majesty’s Army, while Diana was described as a divisional secretary of the British Red Cross, which gave nothing away. Airey’s father was registered as a Doctor of Science and Diana’s father, Thomas Giffard, as ‘landed proprietor’.