Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  Diana Giffard, a linguist, was also in the Secret Service. War work took her initially into nursing at an RAF hospital, but, like Neave, she was talent-spotted by a Foreign Office scout and was moved into intelligence. She worked for the Political Warfare Executive, which conducted secret broadcasting and black propaganda to Occupied Europe in close liaison with the BBC. The PWE was based at the riding school at Woburn Abbey and at Bush House. She also worked secretly for the Polish Ministry of Education. Many years later, Diana admitted that while he (Neave) ‘commanded agents in the field’ she worked on ‘equally secret operations’. A subsequent account suggests that, so intense was the secrecy of their respective war work, it was only when they lost one of their mutual agents that they discovered they were both involved in intelligence. This is hard to credit, since they moved very much in Secret Service circles, professionally and socially, and MI6 looked benignly on relationships within the service because they reinforced the ring of discretion. Neave himself used to tell a story that he met his new bride in a restricted area ‘and we had one of those ludicrous “what are you doing here?” confrontations’. His anecdote is the more credible.

  Neave described Diana as ‘a beautiful auburn-haired girl’ and could not believe his luck. In the depths of his despair in Room 900 ‘she restored my will to fight on and complete my part in this story’. Patrick Cosgrave has said she had an elfin beauty, great charm and a ready wit. Like other wartime marriages, particularly where both individuals worked for the Secret Services, happiness had to be seized whenever it offered itself. In a foreword to one of his books, Diana wrote: ‘We both understood the dangers, fully aware that the Gestapo would have no mercy if Airey were caught in enemy territory. It was a bittersweet time, when the gnawing anxiety would be relieved by the joy of a sudden reunion and our unflagging optimism that the war could not last forever.’

  The Neaves had a short honeymoon in January 1943 and returned to London to live in a flat at Ebury House, further down Elizabeth Street, belonging to an aunt of Diana’s. Here, he continued to bring agents for debriefing, Diana playing her part by providing ‘the best wartime hospitality’. Among the field operatives who sipped sherry while recounting their harrowing experiences was a twenty-year-old Belgian girl, Peggy van Lier, who had just escaped the clutches of the Gestapo. Jimmy Langley fell in love with her as she stepped off the plane and they too married.

  Despite personal happiness for Neave at home, MI9 operators were struck by successive blows in 1943, not least when Dédée was finally captured. In London, Neave felt the agony and frustration of the remote, chairborne commander, unable to do anything except wait for news from clandestine wireless contacts. At this stage he decided that he would return to France if he could. Dédée had been taken by the Gestapo at a hideout on the French – Spanish border, betrayed by a farmworker for money. Despite Room 900’s policy of not reinforcing escape lines once they had been broken, Neave personally resolved to get Comet back into operation. He parachuted two young Belgians, one a wireless operator, back into Brussels. They were excited at the prospect of adventure. Neave had a heavier heart, feeling responsible for their young lives. ‘War is dangerous, especially behind enemy lines,’ he wrote later. ‘What is inexcusable is not to feel for the safety of others.’9 Neave saluted his brave Belgians as they boarded an RAF bomber in Bedfordshire. They were dropped in ‘blind’, without a reception committee. A few days later, however, both were arrested in a roll-up of the Brussels organisation that captured Jean Greindl, codename Nemo, MI9’s head of operations in the Belgian capital. Greindl’s son Albert escaped and Neave took him to the Goring Hotel near Victoria for a late-night debriefing, after a special request to relieve him of the unpleasant quarantine of the RVPS. The service discussed the possibility of a neutral country interceding on behalf of Jean Greindl and Neave later observed that, had there been many German agents to exchange, then something like the late twentieth-century spy swaps between the West and the Soviet Union might have taken place. But in 1943, such an initiative would have been pointless: the Nazis had captured too many Allied agents and any move of this nature by MI9 would merely have confirmed their guilt. Jean Greindl died in captivity, ironically the victim of an Allied air raid on the artillery barracks at Etterbeek. It was a grim time for the escape and evasion business.

  9

  Enemy Territory

  Neave took over Room 900 in September 1943, following Langley’s promotion to joint commander of IS9 (Western European Area) as preparations began for the Allied landings in Europe. At this stage of the war, the mass bombing raids on Occupied Europe meant more and more airmen were being shot down, and their successful repatriation was vital for the war effort. The escape and evasion business moved into higher gear. Amid escalating preparations for the forthcoming Allied invasion, Neave looked for more agents and fresh escape routes.

  He flew out to Gibraltar with a senior MI9 officer, Colonel Cecil Rait, to discuss the new arrangements with ‘Monday’, Donald Darling and Baron Jean-François Nothomb. Known by the codename Franco, Nothomb was a handsome and courageous young Belgian, the son of a senator and novelist, who had picked up the dangerous reins of the Comet ratline in Paris. According to Darling, Neave thought Franco was too young for the mammoth task.

  The flight, via Lisbon (Portugal remained neutral) on a KLM plane on charter to BOAC, was a farce. Under War Office instructions, Neave travelled in civilian dress, carrying his uniform in a suitcase. His passport described him as a barrister, which was accurate enough for he had been called to the Bar although he had not yet practised. As he waited for the flight at Bideford aerodrome in Devon, an agitated Special Branch detective called him to the telephone to speak to Room 900 ‘about the lesbians’ false teeth’. Amazingly, this was not a coded message. Brigadier Crockatt was furious that two elderly Parisian ladies who had escaped to England after hiding evaders in their flat had ordered new teeth on Neave’s account. The bill came to the not inconsiderable sum of £70 and Neave insisted that MI9 paid it, in view of the ladies’ bravery. In Lisbon, a disbelieving customs officer saw straight through his civilian ‘disguise’. ‘Good luck, Major Neave, and a pleasant journey,’ he said.

  On the day after his arrival on the Rock, Neave took Nothomb for an audience with the Governor of Gibraltar, Lieutenant General Sir Noël Mason-MacFarlane, in recognition of his outstanding gallantry in rescuing so many servicemen via the Comet line. Mason-MacFarlane received the bemused Belgian aristocrat in bush shirt and khaki shorts, congratulating him on his work and promising that ‘the day of Liberation will soon come’. Neave feared that if Nothomb returned to Paris, he would suffer the same fate as Greindl and Dédée. Nothomb rejected Neave’s proposal of rest and recuperation in England and was smuggled back across the frontier into Spain in the boot of Darling’s car. Darling later wrote: ‘We both felt inwardly that Franco could not much longer avoid the attentions of the Paris Gestapo, though we did not then know that one of Comet’s guides was a traitor, which made the Belgian’s arrest inevitable.’ Neave felt certain that he would never see Nothomb again. Franco made three more escape journeys, bringing his personal tally of rescued servicemen to 215, before being arrested by the Gestapo six months before D-Day. He was sent to a concentration camp but survived the war to become a priest.

  Working with MI9 continually brought Neave into contact with some remarkable men and women. He was particularly impressed by Ghita Mary Lindell, the Comtesse de Milleville, a woman with a passion for adventure equalled only by her ardour for plain speaking. Mary arrived in London in the summer of 1942, after bringing a wounded captain in the Welsh Guards from Paris to Vichy France where he obtained Irish papers and escaped back to England via Portugal. She presented herself to Neave in the St James’s Street flat, ‘very definitely English and used to getting her own way’, asking to be returned to France where she had lived since 1919 with her husband and three children after serving with great distinction as a Red Cross nurse in the Great War. M
ary, then forty-five, had already served a nine-month prison sentence in the notorious Fresnes jail for helping Allied servicemen on the run. Released in late 1941, she found herself on the run but still working for the escape lines. Her keenness to return to the fray overcame Neave’s anxieties for her safety, and she became his first female agent to be dropped back into Occupied Europe in October 1942 armed only with a French Red Cross identity card forged by MI9 in the name of Ghita de Melville. Neave drove her to RAF Tangmere in the autumn dusk, confident of her ability to succeed, but with a heavy heart. He feared the risk of degrading torture, which distressed intelligence officers of his generation. ‘It was an attitude which many women agents scorned as Victorian,’ he later recalled, ‘and perhaps it was.’

  But the bold comtesse went on to rescue a number of servicemen, including two of the famous ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ after the daring commando raid on Bordeaux harbour. MI9 had collaborated in the planning of Operation Frankton, a raid on enemy shipping in the harbour of Bordeaux in December 1942. Five two-man canoes were launched from a submarine off the mouth of the River Gironde, and two got as far as Bordeaux where they fixed mines on seven ships, causing great damage and infuriating Hitler. Neave was involved in the operation because the men knew they could not return to the submarine and would have to escape as best they could or accept capture. They were told to make for the town of Ruffec after their mission, where they would find an organisation able to smuggle them home. Neave was very anxious about giving the raiding party details of the escape line contacts, fearing that the commandos might reveal the secret under torture. Death was the usual fate of French civilian helpers at the hands of the Nazis. It seemed to him the worst of both worlds. There was no guarantee that the commandos would make contact with the comtesse or her agents, and she had not been forewarned of the raid. In the event, only two of the ten men got away after the mission, Major H.G. ‘Blondie’ Hasler, an Atlantic yachtsman and leader of the party, and Marine Sparks. With the aid of special maps and compasses supplied by Neave, they walked nearly a hundred miles across enemy territory to Ruffec and made contact with the escape line by giving a note to the sympathetic patronne of a small hotel. The comtesse took them under her wing, on one condition: ‘NO GIRLS. From past experience we know that once they meet a pretty girl everything goes to hell.’ After considerable adventures, Mary got her charges across the Pyrenees into Spain. She continued her escape work on unconventional lines that had the men of Room 900 tearing out their hair, until she was arrested by the Germans at the border railway station at Pau in late 1943. Brutally treated by SD (Sicherheitsdienst) officers, her life was saved by a German surgeon, only for her to be transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp in September 1944. But Mary Lindell not only survived: she worked in the camp hospital and saved several women from the gas chamber, including an SOE agent. Neave found her intractable and often unlucky, but her pertinacity and daring were ‘almost without precedent’.

  Room 900 dispatched only one other woman to Occupied Europe. In 1943, Neave parachuted Beatrice ‘Trix’ Terwindt, codename Felix, into Holland. Tragically, and unknown at this time to the War Office, Britain’s SOE operations in Holland had been successfully infiltrated by German counter-intelligence, the Abwehr. Many years later, when he came to chronicle the work of MI9, Neave still found it difficult to write about her. In February 1943, he took her out to Tempsford aerodrome and they shook hands before she climbed into the Halifax bomber. From a captured radio transmitter, the Nazis knew an agent was coming, but not that it would be a woman. The Dutch reception committee were collaborators, who tricked her into giving the name of her contact in The Hague. When she realised that she was in enemy hands, Trix tried to take her suicide pill but her captors thwarted her. She was interrogated virtually non-stop for three days, then gaoled. Trix did not talk: she endured imprisonment in Ravensbrück and Mauthausen before being released through the Red Cross a week before the end of the war. Neave considered this ‘tragic failure’ to be one of the saddest episodes in Room 900’s history of human success and sacrifice. ‘I never sent a woman on a similar mission from England during the rest of the war,’ he recalled.

  Wartime security was so strict that Neave himself was not allowed to go back into Occupied Europe. As an organising officer he knew too much and the War Office could not risk him being captured. Yet the Germans were aware of the existence of Room 900. They had a file on Jimmy Langley, and even knew that he was a member of Brooks’s Club. They had a photograph of him and were acquainted with MI9’s operational arrangements.

  After Neave took charge of Room 900 from Langley, his first big exercise was Operation Shelburne, a new escape organisation bringing back escapers by high-speed motor gunboats from a beach codenamed Bonaparte, near Plouha on the north Britanny coast. Despite the official ban on intelligence officers going into the field, Neave wanted to be with his evacuation teams. ‘I do not pretend that I had any desire to risk recapture by the Germans,’ he admitted. ‘It was not only my escape from Colditz, but the possibility that my name was known to them through the arrest of others that finally led Crockatt to forbid me to go to Britanny.’1 Operations began in January 1944, and in a brilliant debut the gunboats running out of Dartmouth brought back nineteen men: four RAF crew, thirteen American airmen and two Frenchmen seeking to enlist. A month later, Neave and his Room 900 French agents brought out twenty more, including sixteen USAF flyers. In March, a further thirty got away, more than half of them American survivors of the massive daylight raids. Shelburne continued until after D-Day, bringing out a total of 135 men and women. Almost a hundred more were spirited across the border into Spain.

  Neave, however, was never satisfied that he was doing enough. With the Allied landings imminent, he considered how MI9 could shelter and supply from the air large groups of men who would be on the run in Occupied Europe, unable to make neutral territory because of the destruction of the rail system in northern France. Neave’s answer was Operation Marathon, a scheme to concentrate downed aircrew in hidden camps well away from the battle zone. Hiding places were identified in France, Belgium and Holland, usually in heavily wooded areas, where the men could hold out until the Allied advance reached them. He reckoned on concealing 500 men at a time, in sites where they could be supplied by air drops. It was an ambitious plan and attracted criticism that it was ‘too risky’, especially the sending out of advance forces to set up the camps. But the Air Ministry, which had scoffed at MI9’s operations earlier in the war, now recognised the value of getting aircrew back and gave valuable support. Neave recruited a magnificent team of French and Belgian agents to create the camps in Rennes and Châteaudun, north of the Loire valley in France, and in the Ardennes, Belgium. The first agents were sent out into the field in late 1943, after a particularly exacting party thrown by Neave at the Embassy Club in London, during which a French veteran escape organiser was seen to swing on the chandelier. The war did not diminish Neave’s enjoyment of life. Amid the high jinks, he had been nicknamed ‘Napoleon’ and this was used by the advance parties in France to identify themselves.

  The date of the Normandy invasion was a closely guarded secret but Neave worked on the assumption that it would be in the late spring of 1944. In the intervening months, he set up a shadow organisation. The first site chosen to concentrate men on the run was in the Forêt de Fréteval, north of Tours. It was designed to hold men who could not be got out via Operation Shelburne. Neave sent out his agents in April to prepare the ground, and set in motion Operation Sherwood. He appreciated that his radical plan involved great risks, but the area was a stronghold of the Resistance and local farmers and shopkeepers were sympathetic to the Allies. Increasing movement of German troops made travel around Occupied Europe more dangerous and difficult, but in late May the first downed aircrew were brought along the Comet line to this secluded spot. Neave arranged air drops of tents, medicines, clothes and food to supplement provisions bought locally. The diet was surprisingly generou
s for a clandestine camp surviving virtually under the noses of the Nazis. Neave’s agents calculated that the men should get 500 grammes of bread per day, plus two eggs, a litre of milk, 100 grammes of meat, 400 grammes of potatoes and fresh fruit whenever possible. By the end of July, six weeks after D-Day, the camp held over a hundred men. A month later, the figure had risen to 152, and a second camp had to be established six miles away. The men maintained some military discipline, rising at six and camouflaging their tents with branches. Boredom was a serious problem, though they fashioned a rudimentary golf course among the trees. Their chief distraction was listening to the progress of the war on the wireless. As the battering of the Wehrmacht intensified, smaller camps were established in northern France.

  Neave decided that he should personally liberate the camps. He persuaded his superior officers that IS9, the Anglo-American (Western European Area) outfit, should be responsible for this operation. IS9 was attached to the intelligence staff of Montgomery’s 21 Army Group, Langley was posted as General Staff Officer (Intelligence), or GSO1 (I), and Neave became GSO2 (Planning) of IS9, and therefore GSO2 (I) of 21 Army Group. These glorified titles disguised his real underground activities, he later confessed. He never went anywhere near 21 Army Group, leaving the links to Langley, but concerned himself entirely with rescue operations until the British army reached and finally liberated Holland in May i945. Donald Darling was brought back from Gibraltar to run Room 900, and Neave sailed to Normandy on a motor torpedo-boat, disembarking at Courseulles in July 1944 just weeks after the Allied landings. IS9 was based in Bayeux, near Caen. They were a motley crew, with a headquarters staff, two interrogation sections and four field sections, one English, two American and one Canadian, equipped with jeeps. However, they were lightly armed and if there was any serious risk of fighting, they would have to call on special troops, including the SAS and commando units. For nearly a month, while the invading Allies struggled to break out of the Normandy beachhead, Neave and his fellow officers had little to do. He put up an idea for sending French and Belgian guides – ‘retrievers’ – through the enemy lines to contact downed airmen and, if possible bring them back, but the proposal was rejected as too dangerous. As they kicked their heels in Bayeux, Neave’s outfit attracted criticism from staff officers that IS9 was a ‘private army’ and not their affair. This was a misunderstanding, traceable to the division between orthodox military intelligence in a combat area and Room 900’s clandestine operations. However, it was a distinction that appealed to Neave’s sense of the adventurous and unconventional. It was not genuinely ‘private warfare’, of course. Neave was an officer in an invading army and had to obey orders but there was a freelance feel to his military activities.