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Author's Note AUTHOR’S NOTE A history of MI9 was first provided by Airey Neave (Saturday at MI9) in 1969. His account, followed by those of Donald Darling and then M.R.D. Foot with Jimmy Langley, closely matches the history and development of MI9 as seen in the official MI9 histories, training lectures and manuals and MI9 bulletins.1 The types of escape aids, and the amounts of these sent in to POW camps, were also detailed in their books prior to declassification of the official MI9 war diary.2 There are limiting factors with the MI9 files which contain no historical accounts of the formation and history of the Comet Line, Pat Line or sea evacuations. MI9 was running its operations in the context of a war that needed to be won and therefore was clearly not collecting information to write an official history of the escape lines later. The reconstructions by Foot and Langley, Darling and Neave from eyewitness accounts, leaders of the escape lines, helpers and MI9 agents provide the first detailed histories of escape lines that cannot be reconstructed from material in MI9 files. New material will emerge in this book on the role of MI9’s women who worked at its headquarters, first in London and then at Wilton Park in Beaconsfield. MI9 used female interrogators – a job traditionally reserved only for men. I also uncover new evidence related to women’s intelligence work in occupied Europe. Through simple and ordinary acts of resistance, they made a significant contribution to saving Allied airmen and soldiers. Their stories in Italy are a good example of this. Material is included on the Rome Escape Organisation under Sam Derry and Monsignor O’Flaherty – a story which, although published in 1960, is often forgotten in books on MI9. It is now xi AUTHOR’S NOTE possible to include this escape line with the benefit of declassified Foreign Office files. Highlighted for the first time, too, are certain stories of escape into Switzerland and the role of the Vatican in MI9’s work. The Vatican is rarely, if ever, included in historical accounts of MI9,3 but it supported the intelligence unit and the Rome Escape Organisation which operated from within the Vatican precincts. During the course of this book I raise questions about the traditional understanding of the Vatican’s neutrality during the war.4 Another area I explore in depth is the contribution of Varian Fry, the American who rescued Jews and intelligentsia from Marseille and smuggled them over the Pyrenees into Spain during 1940-41. Fry, who is no relation to the author, worked in this period for British intelligence as a spy. I look at the under- cover work of former Austrian émigré Fritz Molden who established networks for British and American intelligence from Italy, into Switzerland and Austria. Included, too, are accounts of the sea evacuations in support of MI9, Special Operations Executive (SOE) and MI6.5 Access to the family papers of helpers in Britain and Belgium provides more detail to the traditional stories as told by Foot and Langley, and Neave. This is particularly true for the ‘Maréchal affair’, when the Belgian Maréchal family was betrayed, and the personal accounts reveal the subsequent implications of that denouncement for the Comet Line. If there is a strong theme that emerges in MI9’s history, it concerns the commitment and courage of the thousands of helpers, couriers and guides in Europe. They were prepared to work for a secret, unnamed organisation in Britain and were united in the concerted effort to free Europe from Nazi occu- pation. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, himself a POW and escaper in the Boer War, understood the difficulties which prisoners had to bear. He sent a rallying message to British POWs to boost their morale: In this great struggle in which we are engaged, my thoughts are often with you who have had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Nazi. Your lot is a hard one, but it will help you to keep your courage up to know that all is well at home. Never has the country been so completely united in its determination to exterminate Nazidom and re-establish freedom in the xii AUTHOR’S NOTE world . We press forward steadily along the road to certain victory. Keep yourselves fit in mind and body, so that you may the better serve our land, and, when peace comes, play your part in establishing a happier, safer homeland. God bless you all.6 Churchill was an advocate of unorthodox methods of warfare and whole- heartedly supported the work of MI9.7 His order for the establishment of the most unorthodox organisation of them all – Special Operations Executive (SOE) – to ‘set Europe ablaze’, caused great anxiety in MI6 and especially for its deputy chief, Claude Dansey. SOE was carrying out acts of sabotage too close to MI6 agents and escape lines, hence drawing attention to areas within occupied Europe where MI6 would rather quietly carry out its work undisturbed. But occasion- ally, SOE and MI6 agents had to be evacuated via MI9’s sea operations, and these are a good example of rare cooperation; generally, SOE operated separately from MI9 and MI6.8 The tales of audacious escapes soon found their way into popular culture and became amongst some of the best-loved stories of the Second World War, inspiring major films such asThe Great Escape. But MI9 was as much about the eclectic characters who ran this secret service for escape and evasion as the Allied airmen and soldiers who escaped with the assistance of many known and unknown helpers across Europe. The challenge in writing this book has been marshalling the sheer volume of research material now available – from thousands of declassified MI9 files at the National Archives, to published and unpublished memoirs, biographies, papers in family possession, military archives abroad and primary interviews with former helpers and descendants of MI9 personnel. The quantity of files on MI9 in all theatres of the war would require several published volumes to do it justice, so the main focus of the book is on escape and evasion in Western Europe. The book is able to provide an updated history of MI9 using declassified files from the National Archives alongside new material released from the Military Archives in Belgium (VSSE), unpublished papers and memoirs, and interviews with families of MI9 and escape line personnel, and a surviving veteran of the Comet Line. By unearthing hitherto unpublished material, I xiii AUTHOR’S NOTE hope to provide an account of the human stories of MI9 alongside the organ- isation and its operations. It is important to clarify what kind of material is contained in the MI9 files. These files consist of thousands of escape and evasion reports from the interroga- tion of returning Allied personnel, as well as historical MI9 bulletins, MI9 and IS9 histories which set out the scope of MI9’s work and training, and a small number of files containing citations for the awards to helpers. A limited number of official memos and correspondence is available. This is the extent of the currently declassified MI9 files. The individual files for the helpers have not been released to protect their identity even now, although some names are already known from the citations for their awards, or from their autobiographies. The accounts of MI9 by Foot and Langley, Neave and Darling were written with no apparent access to the then classified files. This is clear from a comment by Foot and Langley that ‘whether escapers and evaders provided a significant body of intelligence remains an official secret’.9 It is my intention over the course of the following pages to answer this question and show how MI9’s escapers and evaders did make an important contribution to intelligence. An area that has always been difficult to elucidate has been the historical and operational relationship between MI9 and MI6, both of which ran escape lines and agents. Historically, the lines between these two secret services have appeared blurred. Although MI6 files are not publicly accessible, and a full evaluation of its relationship to MI9 is limited, evidence emerges for the first time here that enables a new analysis of the relationship between MI9 and MI6. Declassified MI9 files, not available to Foot and Langley or Neave, establish that MI9 was in fact involved in intelligence gathering. But this astonishing new discovery goes further than commenting on whether escapers and evaders provided intelligence for MI9; for the first time this book can reveal the extraordinary role that spy (and later traitor) Kim Philby played in Room 900 – the most fiercely protected and highly secret section of MI9. From that previously unpublished material, it is also now possible to understand the type of intelligence that was being collected by Room 900. Traditionally it has been thought that MI9 /Room 900 was solely running escape lines and agents in support of those lines. But it is possible to see xiv AUTHOR’S NOTE that its role went beyond escape and evasion. The biggest disclosure is the fact that MI9’s Room 900 was engaged in intelligence and counter-espionage work on a par with MI6 and, the evidence suggests, even placing it within a section of MI6. This will transform the traditional understanding that MI9 was solely an administrative organisation for the rescue of escapers and evaders. This exciting new thread to the history of MI9 firmly places MI9 as an intelligence organisa- tion on a level with MI5, MI6, Bletchley Park and today’s GCHQ – something which had previously not been discovered.
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