Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  Cartwright found Neave some better civilian clothing – ‘an awful green tweed suit of Swiss design’ – and took him home for the night. He then stayed with Cartwright’s assistant, Major Fryer, (who would also have been in the know) and his wife for a couple of nights, attending the legation in the mornings ‘for various papers to be put in order’. In the jargon of a later generation, he was being talent-spotted by MI9. In the afternoons, he wandered around Berne, smoking Stumpen, small Swiss cheroots, for which he had conceived ‘an eccentric passion’. After nearly two years of incarceration, it was some time before he got used to traffic and the ways of a busy city. Cartwright sent him for a medical examination by Dr von Erlach, a Swiss doctor who by extraordinary coincidence had first met Neave in Spangenburg camp in 1941. Baron von Erlach, a senior official in the Red Cross and also a colonel in the Swiss army, had led a deputation to the camp. There he had conveyed a message from Madame Paravicini to the young British officer: ‘Your family are well and send you their love,’ he told Neave. Now, von Erlach found him reasonably fit but prescribed three weeks’ rest at his own home, Rosengarten, an agreeable chalet situated near Gertenzee. Here, Neave celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday and pondered his future. He had not thought beyond the enormous challenge of escape. Nothing, he imagined, could match the elation of freeing himself from the clutches of the Nazis. Transferred to a hotel in Fribourg, under close watch by the Swiss police, he lived a life of ‘mild dissipation’, waiting for a summons. He drank absinthe, mixed with Polish officers interned in the area and made up for lost time in the company of young women, some of them, by his own admission, ‘alleged female spies’. He also attended one lecture on architecture at Fribourg University.

  In March 1942, the summons came. He was recalled to Berne, where Colonel Cartwright gave him a dressing down for mixing too freely with ‘unreliable’ girlfriends who could indeed be spies. As a veteran of Gestapo interrogation, Neave prided himself on being able to deceive any female agents of the Third Reich. The interview must have gone well because he was brought back on 15 April. Expecting another lecture on security, the young lieutenant was ‘astonished’ when the military attaché growled: ‘We’re sending you back first, Neave. MI9 have asked for you.’ In retrospect, it seems more remarkable that Neave was so unsuspecting. He was an obvious candidate for recruitment to an escape and intelligence service for he had made the first successful British breakout from Germany’s most impregnable fortress. Unbidden, he had offered a military assessment of Graudenz aerodrome. He had survived the attentions of the Gestapo, and of course he had the right social background. The intelligence services relied heavily on personal recommendation. New entrants were usually ‘one of us’. As a generation of upper-crust British spies for the Soviet Union was discovering, it was unquestionably a matter of who you knew, not what you knew.

  Over an ‘uneasy’ meal, culminating in port, nuts and fine cigars, Cartwright told Neave that he would be leaving for neutral Spain the very next day. Neave was shocked. He had expected regimental orders to go to the Unoccupied Zone of France, but Cartwright was adamant: ‘We are sending you out before the others, even though they escaped from Germany before you.’ Eight other British officers were still enjoying Swiss hospitality. He was being given priority, though the journey through France, over the Pyrenees and across Spain to Gibraltar, was fraught with danger. British officers on similar sorties had been captured by collaborationist Vichy police and handed back to the Germans. As Neave contemplated the ‘sheer excitement’ of his new odyssey, Cartwright said calmly: ‘MI9 have sent orders for you and Hugh Woollatt to cross the Swiss frontier as soon as possible. We have sent one or two people through before. But you are still guinea pigs.’ Woollatt, a regular officer in the Lancashire Fuseliers, had escaped from Oflag Vc at Biberach in southern Germany at the end of 1941. He would be killed in action in the battle of Normandy in 1944. Neave had suspected that he and Woollatt, who was equally enthusiastic about his social life, might be sent back first. ‘Perhaps MI9’s like Cartwright’s real fear was that we might become entangled with beautiful Gestapo spies,’ he admitted later.2 There were indeed grounds for anxiety. Several attempts had already been made to discover how Neave had reached Switzerland. The delights of Fribourg might be fun but it was dangerous there too. He knew it was time to leave. Neave was instructed to leave Berne by the early morning train to Geneva. In true cloak and dagger fashion, he was to approach a man in a dark felt hat at the station bookstall who would be reading the Journal de Genève and make himself known. It was nearly midnight when he parted from Cartwright armed with the password ‘Je viens de la part d’Aristide!’

  Rising early the next day, Neave was impressed when Cartwright turned up in his dressing gown to see him off. ‘I could see that he secretly envied me,’ he observed. Neave watched to see if he was being followed but the train journey was uneventful, despite sharing his compartment with two German businessmen and their fat wives. He met his contact, ‘Robert’, at the bookstall, noticing that he was reading the newspaper upside down. They shook hands, had a reviving glass of Pernod in a nearby bar and motored out to a nondescript hotel in the old sector of the city, which turned out to be little more than a brothel. Here, Neave met Woollatt, a tall dark-haired man, ‘very alert and courageous’ but also blessed with a good sense of humour. Neave signed the register as Oscar Wilde. Not to be outdone, Woollatt wrote Herr Albert Hall. They were shown to a small, bare room and spent several hours smoking, drinking champagne and joking about life in a brothel, before ‘Victor’, a slim Englishman, appeared during the afternoon with a suitcase of new clothes. At last Neave could discard the ridiculous Swiss tweeds, if only for a blue suit that had seen better days. ‘Victor’, who was Cartwright’s man in the British embassy in Geneva, also brought a change of identity for the pair. Henceforth, they journeyed as Czech refugees bound for a reception centre in Marseilles. They had new papers which permitted them to travel in Occupied France. Neave’s photograph, taken after his arrival in Berne, was ‘far from flattering’, but it was his appearance in the fresh set of clothes that concerned him more. With his dark skin, Woollatt looked the part but Neave’s fair hair and boyish looks shouted ‘English’. The embassy envoy solved the problem by jamming an old green workman’s cap on his head, which gave him a flavour of mittel Europa. Their efforts to pronounce incomprehensible Czech cover names reduced the party to fits of laughter. Looking back, Neave found it extraordinary that they should have treated the occasion with such levity.

  That evening they went out for a stroll by Lake Geneva and ate curry with lager beer before holing up in the hotel bedroom for zero hour, set at three thirty the following morning. A Swiss policeman in plain clothes would knock on their door and they were to follow his instructions. He would give the rather transparent password ‘Mr Churchill expects you’. Neither man could sleep and the hours passed with interminable slowness until at the appointed time there came a knock at the door and an archetypal plain-clothes detective said with feeling, ‘Vive Winston Churchill. He wants you back.’ He hurried them to a waiting car. The party travelled south-west, to a graveyard surrounded by a flint wall on the outskirts of the city. Here, they hid among the tombstones, Neave’s curry still troubling him. Over the wall lay a broad band of barbed wire, separating Switzerland and France.

  At five o’clock, as dawn broke, the Swiss policeman gave them his final instructions. They were to cross the barbed-wire barrier with care and climb up the grassy bank to a small white house where a road sign pointed the way to the frontier town of Annemasse. There they would be met by an old man in classic French attire – sabots and beret – sporting a clay pipe in his mouth, upside down. They shook hands with their Swiss helper and vaulted the cemetery wall. As they picked their way through the wire, Neave tore a gaping hole in his ‘Czech’ suit and had to borrow Woollatt’s raincoat to conceal the telltale evidence. Once again, it was as well that he was not travelling alone. They swiftly made their rende
zvous, only to find the traffic was almost entirely made up of men dressed exactly as their contact, most of them smoking clay pipes. Eventually, a middle-aged man with silver-grey hair stopped, leaned his bicycle against the signpost and, after a careful, deferential look, announced himself. ‘Good morning, gentlemen. I am Louis Simon, formerly of the Ritz Hotel, London.’ He walked them along the road to Annemasse, reminiscing about his years as a waiter in the West End. He thought their disguises poor. He could see that they were gentlemen. Neave was equally unimpressed by Louis’ country smock, picturing him instead in his black tailcoat moving self-assuredly among diners at the Ritz.

  Their walk along the road to the douanier more resembled a gentle morning stroll in the Haute-Savoie than that initial frightening passage from enemy territory to Switzterland. When they reached the border post, it was raining hard and the escapers mingled with early morning workmen while Louis chatted to the frontier guard. The sun came out as they strode into France and a mile later they came upon Louis’ red-brick villa set back from the road. His wife had prepared an enormous repast of ham, eggs, toast and coffee, which she set before them as ‘a special London breakfast’. They saw from her face that she was worried, and she admitted that she had not slept the night before. She was relieved that they had got this far. Monsieur and Madame Simon, and many other brave people like them in Occupied Europe, were taking the most terrible risk in sheltering Allied servicemen. If Neave and Woollatt were recaptured they could expect to be sent back to Colditz for another month in the town gaol. The French couple would either be shot or sent to a concentration camp, which often amounted to the same thing. Both were death sentences.

  At this point in the war, April 1942, the escape routes organised by MI9, known as ratlines, were still in their infancy. Several hundred Allied airmen, soldiers and sailors were being held by the Vichy authorities at two prison fortresses, St Hippolyt-du-Fort, near Nîmes, where the French began interning British personnel from the spring of 1941, and Fort de la Revère at La Turbie, outside Monte Carlo. Here were imprisoned Expeditionary Force survivors from Dunkirk who had got over the demarcation line only to be interned by the French, together with RAF aircrew shot down over France and other Allied servicemen. The first escape line had been set up as early as the summer of 1940 by a Belgian army medical officer, Albert-Marie Guérisse, who had escaped to Gibraltar after the fall of Paris. This exceptionally courageous man had, with a French naval officer, commandeered a cargo vessel, Le Rhin, and sailed her to the Rock. She was taken over by the Royal Navy, renamed HMS Fidelity and pressed into service ferrying escapers from southern France to Gibraltar and infiltrating SOE and MI6 agents. On a mission in April 1941, Guérisse, codenamed Pat O’Leary, was captured by a Vichy French patrol near the Spanish border and incarcerated in St Hippolyt. He escaped, but instead of fleeing to England stayed behind to set up a ratline, named the Pat line after his pseudonym. It was down this line that Neave and Woollatt were to be repatriated.

  The escapers were taken by a second guide, Mademoiselle Jeanne, a ‘quiet, mystic young girl’, no older than eighteen, from Simon’s villa to the backstreets of Annemasse. Jeanne did not speak until she had taken them to the safety of a run-down house where they were once again fed with coffee and fried eggs. Neave tried to engage the girl in conversation about the escape route and its organisers, but she confined her reply to: ‘All I ask of you is that you should send a message on the BBC if you get back to England to safety. Here, everyone listens to the BBC.’ Bowed by her transparent faith in her duty, the British pair sat in silence as she left. The experience made a powerful impression on Neave. He detected ‘a strange light’ in her eyes, recording that ‘Nothing could have expressed more powerfully the spirit of resistance to Hitler … I never forgot this first revelation of the courage of ordinary French men and women in helping us to escape.’3 His admiration of the girls who carried out this dangerous task grew and unquestionably reshaped his attitude to women. Neave grew up in a male-dominated household but his wartime encounters inspired respect – reverence even – of women. He was well ahead of his time in what would now be called gender politics.

  The escapers waited an hour after Jeanne left, sitting over coffee made in the dingy kitchen watched by an alarmed housewife and her two small children. Their reverie was broken by the arrival of Alex, a portly Frenchman who cheerfully announced himself as a well-known black marketeer. His daytime profession was perfect cover for aiding escapers. Alex drove an antiquated Citroën powered by a charcoal burner. In this, they banged and rattled off through Ugine towards Annecy. En route, there was a scare when les flics roared towards them, horn blaring. Neave and Woollatt took to their heels among bushes by Lake Annecy. As Alex predicted, the police stopped briefly but ignored him, and the trio bounced noisily into Annecy, coming to rest under an archway by a large square. Here, announced the black marketeer, was the home of Pierre and Cécile. Their flat was above the archway and the woman of the house had prepared another substantial meal. Cécile, Neave noticed, had none of the quiet courage of Jeanne. Her hands were shaking as she served the food. Fear stalked her every move and she behaved like a frightened animal. ‘A sense of family duty alone kept her from panic,’ Neave observed later. ‘She was courageous in her weakness, seeking to struggle on for the sake of her husband.’4 The meal continued over liqueurs into the afternoon while Alex questioned them about their phoney Czech papers and they expressed fears about their fate if questioned by the police. The atmosphere grew tense and Neave sought to ease the strain by talking about life under the Pétain regime. They heard sobbing in the kitchen and raised voices: Pierre was quarrelling with his wife over the risks they were taking. The escapers sat in a taut, guilty silence until Alex and Pierre led them from the dingy flat to the gazogène Citroën for the next stage of their underground journey to Chambéry. As they left, Neave discerned ‘forlorn and defenceless’ Cécile, her face smudged with tears.

  The party spent a few hours at a safe house near the station before boarding a crowded overnight train to Marseilles. Clutching their battered briefcases, the escapers and their minders fought their way into a carriage. Neave wore his Geneva suit and a French tweed cap; Woollatt had acquired a grey Homburg, a size or two too small. They attracted no attention until Neave, unable to sleep, left the compartment to get some fresh air in the corridor. He was immediately aware of a young, blond-haired officer of the Milice, the Vichy police, standing next to him. Lacking confidence in his Czech cover story, Neave implored Alex with his eyes to take his place. He did so, drawing the policeman into conversation, but Neave found the officer’s cold blue eyes still on him when the crowded train steamed into Marseilles at seven in the morning of 17 April. They hurried out into the bright sunlit boulevards, making for the Canebière district where the guides expected to find shelter before the final stage of the escapers’ journey from Vichy France to neutral Spain. Their first effort drew a blank. After a nightmare quest through the filthy back lanes of the port, they were thrown out of the ‘safe’ address by an enormous prostitute enraged that the men were not seeking her favours. They moved on to a second address given by ‘Robert’ in Geneva, and after noon found themselves, drained and famished, in the Café Petit Poucet, a working-class restaurant on the Boulevard Dugommier. A waiter motioned them to a table, but when Neave asked for ‘Gaston’ he looked around in fear and shot through glass double doors. The patron, a short, balding man, was not pleased to see them. He ordered them into a back room and demanded the password. Then, to the consternation of the escape party, he brought a young gendarme in through a side door. Neave, fearing a trap, demanded to know who he was. The patron told him to mind his own business. The gendarme, Jacques, was clearly a trusted man who would bring someone to talk to them. They waited, Alex and Pierre silently fuming. It was clear that, by barging in so ostentatiously, they had upset their host. ‘Gaston’ relaxed, ordered them coffee and drinks, and a short time later a slightly built, sharply dressed man of mid
dle age sporting a neat grey moustache entered the room.

  He introduced himself as ‘Maurice’ and demanded the password. Satisfied with the response, he addressed the escapers in perfect English, asking about Geneva and their journey through Vichy France while their guides looked blankly on. This was the mysterious Louis Nouveau, a rich Marseilles businessman, who both funded and organised the Pat evasion line. ‘Maurice’ joked about taking messages to his solicitor in England, and of taking a bottle of champagne home to give to his broker in the City. The two men gazed in astonishment at this extravagant figure, for whom even their exotic travels had not prepared them. ‘Maurice’ made an elegant joke about Pierre Laval (‘there must be something wrong about a man who always wears a long white tie’) and debated the merits of Pimms No. 1 before warning them of the dangers still ahead. Not until 1969 did Neave reveal that Nouveau was a well-known merchant banker who served as one of the most faithful and devoted workers of the Resistance. He even gave the Pat line £5,000, a small fortune in 1942, from his own funds.

  Their elegant new guide took over from Alex and Pierre, instructing Neave and Woollatt to follow him at thirty paces and stop when he stopped. Nouveau led them through the marketplace to a modern block of flats by the harbourside. After a false alarm over a watching gendarme, he lifted his hat and wiped his brow as a signal for them to enter the apartment block. Nouveau’s flat was on the fifth floor, commanding a fine view over the Old Port and the Mediterranean. They stayed here for a week while arrangements were made to smuggle them over the Pyrenees and across Spain to Gibraltar. Staring through the picture windows of the flat, Neave considered his position. He was more than halfway home but embattled Britain was still 800 miles away. They idled their time away, shuffling round in heavy felt slippers to deaden the sound of their presence from occupants in the flat below, who were suspected Vichy sympathisers. In his ridiculous furry slippers, Neave felt vulnerable to sudden police raids. He also chafed at being a ‘parcel’ on the mysterious Pat escape route. He did not yet know the true identity of Pat O’Leary; he felt claustrophobic, with no control over his destiny, and even considered making a bolt for it alone. But wiser counsels prevailed, and one afternoon his organisers turned up in great secrecy. They were a truly international crew. A photograph of this meeting round a window seat in Nouveau’s flat shows them relaxed but serious. ‘René’, alias Francis Blanchain, an Englishman of Neave’s age, had been born in France and spoke the language fluently. Then came ‘Solon’, a middle-aged Greek businessman who exuded confidence. His real name was Mario Prassinos and he was clearly in charge of the operation in the absence of ‘O’Leary’, who was in Gibraltar negotiating with MI9 for money, a wireless operator and arms. Finally, they were joined by Timon, also Greek, tall, dark and accompanied by his silent wife, a German Communist.