When the war rudely interrupted this agreeable scene, Neave was among the first to volunteer for active service. His experiences at Calais in 1940, his subsequent capture and imprisonment by the Germans, followed by escape from Colditz in 1942, brought him to the attention of British military intelligence on his arrival in neutral Switzerland, whence he was fast-tracked back to Britain and immediately recruited to MI9, the escape and evasion organisation for Allied servicemen. Nominally an independent section of the war effort, MI9 was in fact – and much to Neave’s delight – a wholly-owned subsidiary of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
Neave worked in this clandestine operation for three years, training agents to be sent into the escape ‘ratlines’ of Occupied Europe and debriefing escapers before following hard on the heels of the invading Allies in July 1944. His service also took him to forward engagement areas in France, Belgium and Holland, where he successfully spirited out remnants of Operation Market Garden, the abortive Arnhem raid. He ended the war a DSO and an MC. The closing stages of the war found Neave in Paris and Brussels in 1944 running British operations to grant awards and medals to MI9 agents who had helped Allied servicemen to escape or evade the enemy. Such operations had a further, undisclosed objective: that of identifying agents who would continue to be valuable after the war in the context of a Cold War (or worse) between Western nations and the Soviet Union. The bureaux drew up lists of ‘reliable’ contacts who would be useful in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It was sensitive work, not least because so many of the Resistance were Communists and at this stage still sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
This covert enterprise, known as Operation Gladio, brought together a wide range of skills, from those involving psychological warfare and sabotage to escape and evasion. Gladio’s purpose was to set up ‘stay-behind’ units that would be active in a Europe threatened or even occupied by the USSR. Their existence has never been officially recognised, nor disclosed. Stephen Dorril argues: ‘It appears that sections of MI6 were already thinking in terms of the next war, and part of that was a fear that the Red Army would continue from Berlin and go straight to the Channel coast. They wanted stay-behind units against the Red Army in the same way that they wanted them against the Germans. Some of these units put in place in 1944 were almost immediately being resurrected as anti-Communist units – ratlines for escape and evasion.’7 SOE would take on the sabotage role, while Neave’s old firm would carry on as before.
But in post-war austere Britain the climate was against such initiatives: money for secret operations was getting tight and it was difficult to sustain a continuity between wartime and post-war groups. The Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee disapproved of such activities and the emphasis shifted from formal policy to the unofficial but well-connected world of former intelligence operatives. The thread continued in dining clubs, the Special Services Club and in the part-time Territorial Army. MI9 was reborn as Intelligence School 9 (TA) and Neave was commanding officer from 1949 to 1951, at a time when he was seeking to enter public life as a Conservative MP. IS9 later became 23 SAS Regiment, based in the Midlands, with a role to counter domestic subversion.
While his political career blossomed in the late 1950s, Neave’s links with the secret state necessarily became more obscure. It is known that sometime in 1955, he approved the appointment of British spy Greville Wynne as the representative in Eastern Europe of the pressure-vessel manufacturers John Thompson, of which Neave was a director. Like Neave, Wynne had worked for MI6 during the war. He returned to spying in the mid fifties and used his business trips behind the Iron Curtain to recruit the Soviet spymaster Oleg Penkovsky, before being unmasked and jailed. He was freed in exchange for Russian agent Gordon Lonsdale. Wynne confessed that ‘after a time, espionage is like a drug, you become to a greater or lesser extent addicted.’ It is inconceivable that Neave was unaware of Wynne’s MI6 role. Neave continued to meet with his old comrades, and to harbour fears of Communist subversion, but to the world at large he was a quiet, thoughtful man, assumed by commentators to be on the centre-left of his party. After his relatively brief, and not very glorious, ministerial career at the Transport and Air departments, he returned to the back benches in 1959. From there he campaigned successfully for compensation for British survivors of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but unsuccessfully for the release from Spandau prison of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess, whose flight to Scotland in May 1941 had delivered him into British hands. He sought to assuage the suffering of refugees through his voluntary work for the UN High Commission for Refugees. In addition, he became a governor of Imperial College, London, and chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology.
But behind the façade there still burned a sense of mission. He watched with apprehension the collectivist drift of Britain and the growing power of the trade unions. He believed the danger of expansionist Communism was both real and present and he believed fiercely in freedom. In the record of his wartime exploits, They Have Their Exits, he laid down his credo, ‘No one who has not known the pain of imprisonment understands the meaning of liberty’, a line that is engraved on the walls of the museum in Colditz castle as a testament to his dedication. The title of Neave’s book was taken from As You Like It: ‘All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.’ No quotation more satisfyingly expresses the different sides of Airey Neave. He was a man who played many parts but the drama was discreet and informal. He played many roles behind the scene. Given the nature and scale of his involvement with the security services, it may also be argued that Neave valued his own freedom and that of those around him so much that he was prepared to countenance extreme measures to safeguard his concept of liberty. Roger Bolton, a television producer who knew him and put together a documentary on his assassination, argues the paradox that Neave was a moral man willing to do things that immoral people were not: ‘If necessary, he took the gun out and there were difficult things to be done but for the most honourable of reasons.’8
Why did he imagine that he knew better than the rest? Neave was not a particularly gifted politician, and it seems unlikely that he would have risen to the ranks of a Conservative Cabinet in the ordinary way. And yet, of the Tory MPs of his generation, Neave left the most indelible mark on political history by riding an inner conviction that his grasp was somehow superior. He felt he should turn that comprehension to common advantage; he was a spook who believed he knew, and who acted on his beliefs and loyalties. He was not alone in such self-assurance, which is the stock in trade of the spy. Although he was not an orthodox MI6 officer, Neave shared the outlook of the security services and remained close to them. He may have been an elected politician in a democracy, but he shared the misgivings about the world around him expressed most cogently by George Kennedy Young, with whom Neave was actively acquainted.
While still deputy director of MI6, some time in the late 1950s, Young issued a circular to his staff on the role of the spy in the modern world. He noted scathingly the ‘ceaseless talk’ about the rule of law, civilised relations between nations, the spread of the democratic process, self-determination and national sovereignty, respect for the rights of man and human dignity to be found in the press, in Parliament, the United Nations and from the pulpit: ‘The reality, we all know perfectly well, is quite the opposite, and consists of an ever-increasing spread of lawlessness, disregard of international contract, cruelty and corruption. The nuclear stalemate is matched by a moral stalemate.’ Young further stated that ultimately it was the spy who was called upon to remedy situations created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests, and that the spy found himself ‘the main guardian of intellectual integrity.’9 Neave’s nature is readily discernible here: the man who keeps himself to himself, but knows. The man who hates ostentation but goes about his dedicated business with a discreet energy, working for his Queen, country and traditions.
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