386 • NEAVE, AIREY
- NID 17, created early in 1940, liaison with other intelligence agen-
cies - NID 18, liaison with the Americans in Washington, D.C.
NEAVE, AIREY.When he was wounded and captured during the bitter
fighting for Calais in 1940, Lieutenant Airey Neave of the Royal Ar-
tillery was taken to a hospital in Lille as a prisoner of war. After an
unsuccessful escape bid, Neave was transferred to Oflag IXa, a camp
at Spangenburg near Kassel. From there he was moved to a camp at
Thorn in Poland where he succeeded in escaping, but was caught by
the Gestapo after four days.
In May 1941, following a period of detention, Neave was sent to
Oflag IVc, a special camp for persistent escapers better known as
Colditz Castle. From here, on his second try, he made it to the Swiss
frontier in just four days. Early in January 1942 he was received in
Switzerland by British diplomats but he was obliged to wait for a
further three months before he was sent down an escape route
through Vichy France to Spain, dispatched by the British military
attache ́in Bern. Neave was unimpressed by the arrangements.
It was all very well to have read Phillips Oppenheim. This was the real thing,
and it seemed dangerously amateur. I had readSomerset Maugham’s
Ashenden, the master British spy in Switzerland during the First World
War. Surely he had been more professional?Neave reachedGibraltarin April, where he was welcomed byDon-
ald Darling, who arranged for a troopship to take him to Glasgow.
When he finally reached London, he was invited to joinMI9, the
War Office organization created to brief soldiers on what to expect
as prisoners of war. Through his own experience, Neave knew that in
addition to MI9, which also interrogated returning escapees, there
was a separate organization run by theSecret Intelligence Service
(SIS) that managed the escape lines, but in his memoirs he implies
that Darling, who was an SIS officer, was actually MI9.
After the war Neave joined the prosecution staff at the Nuremberg
war crimes trials, and in 1953 was elected the Conservative MP for
Abingdon. He attained ministerial office in the Air Ministry, but was
assassinated by an Irish Nationalist terrorist group as he emerged
from the Palace of Westminster underground car park in 1979,