Back in the family home, Neave looked out at the meadows beyond the walls of the house, bathed in moonlight. ‘There was not a sentry box in sight, no wire, no glint of steel. And yet they were with me always.’ Each night, when he heard the chimes of Big Ben before the BBC news, he ‘wondered what was happening in the camp’. He was home but his mood was melancholy, and the experience of incarceration had left him with a ‘sense of persecution’. It was a natural response, a mild form of survivor guilt, and like any decent person who has been blessed by a deliverance, he could not help thinking about the plight of those left behind and the perils facing those who had helped him on his way.
With the new job, he could start to repay the debt. The pleasures of wartime London helped him recover his spirits. Jimmy Langley had been given a flat at 5 St James’s Street, an elegant stucco-fronted building with tall sash windows next door to the wine merchants Berry Bros and Rudd, and he took rooms nearby: ‘a flat … fit for Bertie Wooster with twentyish furniture’.5 He spent freely on cigars, tobacco for his pipe and stylish shirts. He was a military man about town with a hush-hush job who, after many setbacks, was having a good war, as the MC – for which he was gazetted as soon as he completed his ‘home run’ – attested.
Yet he still functioned inside a faint fog of depression. He was out and about at the cocktail parties that abounded in wartime London, but he found that the ‘heartless chatter … became difficult to endure’.6 Neave makes no mention of any women in his life prior to this time. However, his later diaries do reveal the existence of a pre-war girlfriend. On a trip to Geneva in October 1973, he had dinner with the UK’s permanent representative to the UN there, Sir David ‘Toby’ Hildyard (an Eton contemporary), and his wife, ‘my old girlfriend Millicent Baron’.7 The Barons were Jewish, wealthy and well connected, and friends with the Rufus-Isaacs. It is probable that Airey had met Millicent through his friend Michael Isaacs. She was quite a catch. According to her daughter, ‘My mother could have had the pick of the young men about town looking for an heiress to pay off death duties.’8 Millicent ended up marrying Dickie Longmore, son of a senior RAF officer. Dickie, having followed his father into the service, was killed in action in 1943 while attacking a U-boat.
Despite the lively London social scene, Neave was lonely and often in low spirits and perhaps therefore particularly susceptible to falling in love. There is no doubt, though, that when it happened, it was the real thing. Neave’s marriage was more than an emotional fusion. It was an alliance, a partnership that would sustain him until his dying day. The romance began at one of the unendurable cocktail parties. It was a July evening and he was ‘standing in a corner talking to a red-haired girl, and laughed with her at simple things. I found in her the confidence I needed. The veil of depression was lifted – for the first time since I was a prisoner I was gay again.’ They were ‘soon in love’. According to William Neave, they met only three times before Airey proposed and Diana accepted. On 29 December 1942, they were married by the Bishop of Lichfield in St Mary the Virgin and St Chad’s, next to the bride’s family estate in Staffordshire. It seemed then that everything that had happened to him – his escape, his return and his marriage – was ordained by God, for as the bishop gave his blessing, ‘the sun came suddenly out of the clouds [and] its rays shone on the spot where we were standing in the chancel.’9
The red-haired girl was Diana Giffard. She was slim, lively and intelligent, with striking green eyes. She was three and a half years younger than him – just right – and her background fitted well with his own. She was the daughter of Thomas Giffard, who had married Angela Trollope, a kinswoman of the great Victorian novelist. The Giffards had been in Staffordshire since the Norman conquest. They lived at Chillington Hall, whose park had been landscaped by ‘Capability’ Brown. There was even a romantic link to Neave’s own recent history. The family had given shelter to one of the most celebrated evaders of British history, Charles II. To complete the perfection of the match, Diana was in the same line of business as himself. She had started her war work as a nurse at an RAF hospital, but had soon been approached by the Foreign Office and entered the intelligence world, working as a liaison officer with the Polish government-in-exile in London.10
The move may have been the result of a family connection. Diana’s aunt Sylvia Trollope worked for the intelligence services. According to Marigold Neave, she spent part of the war in Cairo doing ‘something hush-hush’.11 After their marriage, Sylvia arranged for the couple to take over her maisonette above a bakery at 39 Elizabeth Street, near Victoria Station. Agents would spend their last evening in friendly territory there, having a meal and a drink before being parachuted into occupied Europe. Others would celebrate their at least temporary deliverance, having been brought back from London when things got too hot, for a respite and to be debriefed
Diana and Airey started life together as equals, respecting each other’s qualities and abilities. Henceforth they would be a team. Their secret occupations created a certain awkwardness at home and the normal chit-chat about events in the office at the end of the day was somewhat circumscribed. Neave used to like recounting how, shortly after his marriage, he ran into his new wife in a Whitehall corridor that was restricted to those with high security clearances. There followed ‘one of those ludicrous “What are you doing here?” confrontations’.12 There were less amusing manifestations. The family tell a story of how both returned home at the end of a difficult day in a deep depression, each having lost an agent to the Germans. Only much later did they discover that it was the same one. According to Hugh Tilney, a family friend, Diana’s intelligence background ‘gave her the ability – that others didn’t have – to contradict Airey, to debate and often win in discussions with him. She was a big, powerful force for him.’13
On the morning of 26 May 1942, Neave reported for his first day of duty at Room 900. The small team there were involved in the most secret operational aspect of MI9. Much of the parent organisation’s work concerned collecting intelligence about Allied prisoners of war, mostly gleaned from interrogating returnees. This was then used for systematic briefings across the three services on how to avoid capture, or else how to escape. The headquarters were in Beaconsfield, where from 1942 the staff worked harmoniously enough with their American counterparts, MIS-X.
Neave was alongside Langley at the sharp end of the operation, nurturing the networks through which escapers and evaders could get to freedom and back into the fight. Despite what Crockatt had said, he was not directly involved in supporting escape operations. Although Crockatt was Langley’s immediate boss, he also answered to ‘Z’. In the words of Donald Darling, he was ‘very much under the watchful eye of Colonel Dansey’, and made sure his strictures were observed.14 Chief among them was that they were not to get involved in gathering intelligence, let alone in carrying out sabotage operations. That was the province of SOE, new in the game and, according to Langley, ‘not popular’.
Neave arrived at a difficult time. The Pat Line was tottering and new conduits would have to be found. That would require resources, but at this stage escape and evasion was a low priority. The corner of the War Office they occupied proclaimed their status. Before their arrival, it had been used for making the tea. The chances of getting a sympathetic ear when it came to begging flights to drop agents or equipment seemed slight, especially given the competition from other secret intelligence agencies – like SOE – who claimed higher priority.
That first morning Neave was summoned to the presence of MI6’s tricky deputy chief. Claude Dansey made him wait, scratching away with a steel-nibbed pen at some paperwork before breaking the long silence. ‘Many congratulations,’ he said. ‘The best escape – so far.’15 This gladdening opening was soon doused in a shower of cold water. Dansey began to talk of the dangers involved in the operations that Room 900 was running. He cited the precedent of Nurse Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was shot by the Germans in 1915 after being found to have hidden prisoner
s in her clinic in Brussels and helped them escape to neutral Holland. The implication was that Cavell was also gathering intelligence on behalf of SIS and that, by straying into the business of escape and evasion, she had compromised espionage operations.16 Nurse Cavell was greatly revered in Belgium, as well as Britain, but to Dansey she was the epitome of amateur bungling, and her story not a stirring tale of heroism but a warning of what happened when secret organisations overlapped each other, endangering security and complicating operations. He was determined that the next generation of escape-and-evasion networks would not be allowed to jeopardise grander but unspecified designs.
It seemed that, in any case, Room 900’s operations were unlikely to be on a scale that would cause problems. Dansey talked about training organisers, wireless sets, codes and couriers, but it seemed to Neave that they ‘would not be allowed many of them’.17 His first-day enthusiasm evaporated. The War Office seemed just as crazy as Colditz, though somehow less human. There was one last matter to address before lunch. He would need a code name and Langley asked him to pick one. On learning that Darling was ‘Sunday’ and Creswell in Madrid ‘Monday’, he decided to follow suit. Henceforth ‘Saturday’ would hide the identity of Captain Airey Neave.
Neave maintained that he and Langley were essentially a two-man band, though the IS9 files at the National Archives show another officer, Major Page, playing a large part in the management of Room 900. This reticence may be due to the fact that Page was attached to MI6 and when Neave wrote his post-war accounts he omitted the name for security reasons. At the Rules lunch, Langley had already given him the outlines of his specific brief. It was to build up an organisation in Belgium and Holland ‘in case anything happens to Dédée’.18 The obvious next question received an intriguing answer. ‘Dédée’ was Andrée de Jongh, a twenty-five-year-old Belgian woman who for the last ten months had been sending British evaders from Belgium, through France and across the Pyrenees. Her name had come up again in the meeting with ‘Z’, who had made it clear that he had doubts about her credentials.
Dédée would have no more passionate a supporter than Airey Neave, and the competition was fierce. Michael Creswell, the intelligence officer who as ‘Monday’ was MI9’s man in Madrid, was thought to have been in love with her.19 She was idolised by every young airman who struggled behind her up the rocky paths of the Pyrenees as she strode indefatigably onwards, chic and trim in her blue sailor’s trousers. Neave reported that when, during interrogation, returnees spoke about her, ‘their eyes filled with tears … she inspired not only respect, but also deep affection.’20 The line she ran became known as ‘Comète’. In his copious writings about her, Neave always credited her with having founded the organisation. Subsequent research has suggested that her father, Frédéric de Jongh, headmaster of a primary school in Brussels, has a better claim to the honour.21 Whatever the precise history, it was her energy and spirit which drove its work along.
When the Phoney War ended in May 1940, Andrée de Jongh was working in Malmedy as a commercial artist with the giant Sofina conglomerate. She answered a call for auxiliary nurses to tend the expected flood of wounded and returned to the family home, at 73 Avenue Émile Verhaeren in Brussels. She nursed wounded soldiers and British prisoners of war and, around February 1941, was recruited into the Belgian underground. In Dédée were combined a strong but gentle manner, astonishing bravery and neat good looks. It was a devastating mix, and in his subsequent telling of the Comète story, Neave gave her star billing, going as far as dedicating a book, Little Cyclone, to her exploits. It was not what she sought or wanted. When the war was over, Dédée slipped gratefully back into obscurity and spent much of the rest of her life nursing in Africa.
As he told it, in late August 1941, she had turned up out of the blue at the British consulate at Bilbao with three men in tow. She explained that one was a British evader from St-Valery-en-Caux and the others were Belgian officers who wanted to join the Allies, and they had just come over the mountains from France. She claimed with the help of friends to have set up a chain of safe houses and couriers who could ferry men from Brussels to the western Pyrenees. She was offering her organisation’s services to the British if they wanted them. All she asked in return was for expenses to be covered. Dédée was told she would have to wait for a response from London. For one thing, the expenses were not negligible. It cost money to transport, feed and shelter ‘parcels’ – as the evaders were referred to – and the Basque guides wanted payment for their services. For another, who exactly was she? Was it possible that she was a German plant? That was certainly Dansey’s first reaction when her arrival was reported to him, and he continued to make ‘dark hints’ about her reliability, until he was eventually silenced by the evidence of her magnificent record.
The Bilbao consulate was behind her from the start, as were Creswell and Darling. On 17 October, Creswell met her in Bilbao, after she had once again crossed the mountains, this time with two Scottish soldiers who had been hiding since escaping while en route to prison in the summer of 1940. He told her that the British government were ‘vitally concerned’ with recovering the crews of aircraft shot down over Holland, Belgium and France. MI9 agreed to pay the costs of getting the men across. Dédée insisted that the money should be a loan that would be repaid when the war was over. It was a way of reinforcing the line’s independence. Darling signalled his approval of the new asset to Dansey in London in a message that also repeated his doubts about Harold Cole. He received a robust reply: ‘Your summing up of the Cole and De Jongh situations is not appreciated and do not write further in this vein.’22 Dédée was initially codenamed ‘Postwoman’, in keeping with the ‘parcel’ delivery service she operated. According to a note in the MI9 files, she rejected this, as she ‘wished to be known as if she were a man’ and it was duly changed to ‘Postman’.23 Some time later in 1942, the line would become semi-officially known as ‘Comète’, Comet in English, though who named it so and why is unknown.
By the time Neave took over responsibility for Dédée and Comet, its modus operandi was established. The line passed from Brussels to Paris, then to Bayonne and St-Jean-de-Luz, in the Spanish frontier sector of the Occupied Zone. The evaders – by now mostly airmen – were escorted by young men and women couriers. At each stop-over they were sheltered in safe houses by quiet patriots whose commitment carried appalling risks. The chances of detection while travelling were high. The sight of well-nourished, fit young males in civilian dress was unusual in the middle of a total war, and few of the evaders had the language skills to sustain a cover story if they were challenged. Nonetheless, at the outset, Comet produced remarkable results. In the first three months that Neave was at MI9, Dédée and her Basque guide, a tall and immensely strong forty-four-year-old called Florentino Goïcoechea, escorted fifty-four men over the Pyrenees. They made for Bilbao or San Sebastián, where the consul would send a message to Creswell in Madrid. He then drove two hundred miles to meet her. Every week, he sent a report to Neave about Comet’s activities.
Neave was fortunate to be working with two consummate professionals. Like Darling, Creswell was an intelligence officer who dipped in and out of diplomatic posts to cover his activities. He was warm, adventurous and a brilliant linguist. His family had been linked to Gibraltar for generations and he spoke flawless Spanish and French, as well as German. He knew the enemy well, having served in the Berlin embassy in the years before the war and got close to the Nazi hierarchy, shooting game in the mountains with Goering. He was an amateur aviator who flew several times over the Pyrenees and loved motor cars, thinking nothing of driving from London to Gibraltar on a whim.24 His buccaneering approach was matched by a fine understanding of the game in play. For all her spirit and energy, Dédée would need every bit of help she could get.
The initial chaos following the fall of France offered multiple opportunities for British servicemen to evade or escape, and the risks for those who helped them were relatively small. By the end of
1940, German control had tightened over Belgium and occupied France and the Reich’s multiple security organisations were active and efficient. Even as Dédée was making contact with the British in Bilbao, the Gestapo were knocking on the door of her father’s house in Brussels asking questions about her. Three months later, in February 1942, it was the turn of the secret police of the Luftwaffe, who had a direct interest in shutting down an organisation that existed to ferry shot-down airmen back to their squadrons. Unable to lay hands on Dédée, they arrested her elder sister, Suzanne Wittek. Frédéric was away, just across the French border in Valenciennes, organising couriers. It was clear that Brussels was now too hot for either of them, and from then on father and daughter would operate from Paris.
The new chief in Brussels was Baron Jean Greindl, who belonged to a wealthy family that had made its money in the Congo. He was now a director of a Swedish Red Cross canteen in Brussels that fed and clothed the city’s poor children, and provided a useful cover for Comet’s activities. By summer 1942, the majority of its clients were airmen, mostly British but later with a heavy addition of Americans. The destruction of German cities was hotting up under the direction of Air Marshal Arthur Harris, and Bomber Command’s losses were mounting. A surprising number of aircrew were able to struggle free from their stricken machines, brought down by flak and night-fighters as they came and went from their targets. In Holland and Belgium, many found refuge among country dwellers, who passed them on to local resistance networks, to be taken to Brussels and fed into the Comet line.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 13