Public Servant, Secret Agent Read online

  That Thatcher and Tilney should independently have come to the same conclusion should surprise no one, for Airey Neave was an intelligence officer who became a public servant. Like many who have trodden the same path, he did not slough off his first persona when he entered public life. The values of what has become known as ‘the secret state’, as well as the lessons of his wartime experiences, informed his outlook as a politician. He had many contacts among former security service officers and high-ranking army officers, and sympathised with the aims of the ultra-right groups that prepared for ‘civil breakdown’ in the 1970s. He was a public servant who never really stopped being a secret agent.

  Neave’s background helped. His was a conformist, upper middle-class upbringing – prep school, Eton and Oxford, with a career at the Bar beckoning as the Second World War broke out. The son of a prominent entomologist and scion of an Essex county family whose lineage stretched back several hundred years (and included a Governor of the Bank of England), it was only to be expected that he would possess a relatively orthodox outlook on life. In Neave’s case, that sense of being British and right so endemic in his class was reinforced in his mid-teens when he was sent to Germany in 1933 to live with a local family and learn the language. He saw Fascism in practice, and formed a lifelong antipathy, amounting to an obsession, towards authoritarianism. Some of that feeling came from his pre-war and wartime adventures and filtered through a pessimistic fear of the spread of Communism that would harden during the Cold War and the civil unrest in Britain.

  His initial links with the military were conventional enough, beginning when he enlisted in the Territorial Army as an undergraduate at Merton College. If Neave was swimming against the prevailing intellectual tide of leftism at university. His interest in the secretive world of Tory clubland politics also began at this period. He was a member of the Castlereagh Club, a political dining club that met in St James’s, Piccadilly, usually once a fortnight, to hear the views of a Tory dignitary. Donald Hamilton-Hill, later second in command of Special Operations Executive (SOE), the wartime resistance organisation, was also a member. In pre-war days he was chairman of public relations and head of recruiting for the Young Conservatives’ Union, and shared with Neave a predilection for the social contacts which ultimately led them into ‘politically informative circles’. Confidentiality, if not mystery, was the order of the day. Hamilton-Hill recorded that members of the Castlereagh Club held ‘off the record and interesting discussions – with no reporters present and members sworn to secrecy’. After a ‘splendid dinner’ they formed an easy and appreciative friendship over port, brandy and cigars.5 For the young Neave, it was heady and exciting stuff, and plainly a taste for secrecy and subterfuge was being acquired early. One of their mentors was Ronnie Cartland, a Tory MP who would be killed at Dunkirk; Peter Wilkinson, who went on to General de Wiart’s staff of the British Military Mission to Poland in 1939, was also a member. He later became Chief of Administration of the Diplomatic Service, and retired in 1976 as Coordinator of Intelligence and Security in the Cabinet Office. Val Duncan, subsequently knighted and chairman of the Rio Tinto Zinc Corporation, was also to be found at the Castlereagh table. In the late sixties, he would head an enquiry into the Foreign Office at Wilkinson’s behest.

  Quite why the enthusiastic diners chose an Irish grandee as the club’s eponymous hero is unclear, but in Neave’s case it was prophetic. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was born in Dublin in 1769 and became Tory MP for County Down at the end of the eighteenth century. He was appointed Irish Secretary in 1797 and his name became a byword for cruelty, although he was venerated as a great British statesman. In ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ of 1819, Shelley was prompted to write: ‘I met Murder on the Way / He had a mask like Castlereagh’. Almost two hundred years later, his name was remembered in the British government’s Castlereagh interrogation centre in Belfast, itself the subject of an enquiry into Royal Ulster Constabulary brutality during Neave’s time as Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. Thus was Neave drawn early on into the demi-monde of clubland, where politics meets the secret state. Security and intelligence expert Stephen Dorril argues its relevance: ‘This is the key to the way these people operate. Their dining clubs go on for a long time. They are the networks of political power and advancement. They bring all the elements of the secret state together.’6

  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 sp
ymaster 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.

  The Britain of the early 1970s, with its crippling strikes, inflation and civil war in all but name in Ulster, called forth men like him on a mission to save the country they loved. At least, that was the way they saw it. From the recesses of the security services, from the upper reaches of the City, from London’s clubland, and from the right of the Conservative Party, came volunteers eager to fight the good fight, Neave among them. But if his greatest contribution to politics was to mastermind the coup that dethroned Edward Heath (employing the ‘psy-ops’ skills he had acquired in his intelligence years) and brought the leadership of the Tory Party to Margaret Thatcher, it did not rob him of a taste for the covert. Soon after Thatcher took over, amid nervousness in the City as inflation soared to 25 per cent and with the pound at little more than 70 per cent of its 1971 value, Neave attended a reception of Tory MPs given by George Kennedy Young, by now the ex-deputy director of MI6. General Walter Walker, former Commander-in-Chief of NATO’s Northern Command, was also there. In 1973, at the height of industrial unrest, he had set up Civil Assistance, a quasi-private army of ‘apprehensive patriots’ to give aid to the authorities.

  It was never called upon to carry out this function but the theme did not lose its attractions. Neave became involved in Tory Action, a right-wing pressure group within the party, and the National Association for Freedom (NAFF), set up in late 1975 to counter ‘Marxist subversion’. This organisation had more success than Civil Assistance, notably in the legal harrying of strikers. However, the most intriguing – and sinister – of Neave’s operations came in 1976 when he became involved with Colin Wallace, an army intelligence officer working for Army Information Policy in Northern Ireland. Operation Clockwork Orange, initially created to undermine republican terrorists through a disinformation machine to the media, would spread its tentacles into the higher echelons of British politics to probe and exploit the weaknesses of key figures. Aware of Wallace’s MI5 background and his disinformation programme, Neave would maintain his contacts with him when he was appointed Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary.

  Neave’s connections with the secret state, past and present, gave rise to speculation that he could also be given the task of liaising between the government and the intelligence services – a job similar to that undertaken by Colonel George Wigg, Paymaster-General in Harold Wilson’s government.10 Wigg, known in Parliament as ‘the Bloodhound’, certainly admired Neave, describing him as ‘a smart operator who learned from me’. Plainly, the spooks’ mutual admiration society crossed boundaries. It also influenced intelligence policy. Neave’s high opinion of Maurice Oldfield was almost certainly instrumental in Thatcher’s decision to appoint the former head of MI6 as Coordinator of Security and Intelligence in Northern Ireland in October 1979. Oldfield, in charge of MI6 from 1965 to 1977, had survived a bomb attack on his London flat in 1975.

  In parliament, Neave gave full support to Roy Mason, the hard-line Labour Ulster Secretary, urging him to go further and ‘pick off the gangsters’ of the IRA. Neave’s policy for Ireland, insofar as it was understood in London and Dublin, was a twin-track strategy of devolving some powers to local councils in Ulster, coupled with the toughest possible military crackdown on republican terrorism. He had no time for power-sharing between nationalists and Unionists, arguing that it had failed and should not be tried again. It was the agenda of a soldier rather than a politician who understood Ireland and the Irish. Nonetheless, his blood-curdling warnings of the wrath that was to come when the Conservatives took office made republicans sit up and take notice of him. They feared him. He believed he had a special insight into the guerril
la mind. ‘I know how the IRA should be dealt with because I was a terrorist myself once,’ he told an Irish journalist.11

  Neave would have had the British army at his disposal. Indeed, he still thought of himself as ‘one of them’. He believed that specially trained soldiers should be used to ‘get the godfathers of the IRA’ and rejected any suggestion of amnesty for convicted terrorists as part of a peace deal. It was quite clear that the price of liberty in Ulster could involve the annihilation of those engaged in violence for political ends. This Cromwellian solution was what Neave meant by liberty. The policy was to bring about his own death before it could be implemented.

  Yet, for all the convulsions created by Neave’s death, the secret state has left his assassination in a limbo of oblivion. Apart from an (officially) abortive police enquiry, which also involved the security services, there has been no attempt to investigate Neave’s life and death. Sources as diverse as Enoch Powell and ex-collaborators with Neave believe that the authorities themselves may have had a hand in the bloody affair. Even his own daughter Marigold believes the facts have been suppressed. ‘I think there was a cover-up,’ she said across her kitchen table in deepest Worcestershire one cold January morning. ‘They only say “he died a soldier’s death”.’ 12

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  Origins

  Airey Neave was born at 24 De Vere Gardens, Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace and just down the road from the Royal Albert Hall, on 23 January 1916. His father, Sheffield Airey Neave, continued an eccentric family tradition and burdened his son with family surnames, adding to his own that of his wife Dorothy Middleton. Thus, Neave was christened Airey Middleton Sheffield. As he grew up, Airey began to hate his whimsical collection of names, so much so that he rechristened himself Anthony during the war years and only reverted to Airey when he entered public life.