Airey Neave

Airey Neave was a British Army officer and intelligence specialist whose wartime reputation began with captivity rather than command. Captured in 1940, he was eventually sent to Colditz Castle, from which he and the Dutch officer Tony Luteijn escaped in January 1942 disguised as German officers. Neave reached neutral Switzerland and then Britain, becoming the first British officer known to have made a successful home run from Colditz and an unusually experienced recruit for escape-and-evasion work.

Back in Britain, Neave joined MI9 and helped organise support for Allied prisoners and evaders moving through clandestine escape lines in occupied Europe. After the war he served with the British prosecution team at Nuremberg, then entered Conservative politics and became MP for Abingdon in 1953. A close ally of Margaret Thatcher, he was serving as her Northern Ireland spokesman when he was killed on 30 March 1979 by a car bomb planted at the Palace of Westminster by the Irish National Liberation Army.

Helen Fry’s Mi9 follows resistance members, guides, safe-house keepers and intelligence officers whose work linked individual escapes into a transnational organisation. Figures such as Airey Neave and Mary Lindell appear within the documented history of MI9 and its associated escape lines. Fry draws on declassified files and eyewitness testimony to show that celebrated escapes depended on a much larger infrastructure of agents and civilians. Additional non-fiction treatment of Airey Neave comes from Helen Fry’s Nuremberg.