by John Hiddleston

Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave by Paul Routledge

The key word in the title of this long overdue work is “elusive” -- because this experienced journalist’s account of Airey Neave’s colourful career provides more questions than answers. Given little co-operation by his subject’s family, Routledge relies heavily on Neave’s own memoirs and on dubious republican contacts. What does emerge is the story of a life-long secret agent who carried out one operation too many and paid with his life.

Born in London’s fashionable Knightsbridge in 1916, Neave followed the path of many a son of a well-off family, through public school to Merton College, Oxford. Along the way he spent several weeks in 1933 at a school in Germany, where he found Nazi ways distasteful. Perhaps this was the beginning of his intelligence career, initiated through family connections. At Oxford he swiftly joined the TA and became a member of the Castlereagh club, an elitist “gentleman’s club” which met in St. James, Piccadilly, once a fortnight. The guest speaker was usually a senior Tory. Other club members became senior intelligence figures or captains of industry (or both).

When World War Two began, Neave was soon in action in France. Wounded in the defence of Calais in 1940, he was captured by the Germans. His subsequent adventures, culminating in the famous escape from Colditz, are already well documented. He then served in MI9 (IS9), a division of MI6, for the remainder of the War, leaving the army with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

As a Conservative M.P. he made slow but steady progress until a heart attack forced him to return to the backbenches. He spoke often on technological matters, declaring his interest in a firm that built nuclear power stations. He was also a governor of Imperial College. In 1960 he was far ahead of his time in anticipating that satellites would come to dominate international communication. He called for a British communications satellite programme, and served as chairman of the all-party Committee on Space Research.

Neave continued his intelligence connections in peacetime, becoming Officer Commanding IS9(TA), known as Intelligence School, 1949-51. This was absorbed into the SAS in 1959. But it was his political career that would produce his most influential move - persuading his fellow Conservative MPs to accept Margaret Thatcher as their leader. By underplaying her potential support in the first round of voting against Ted Heath, he convinced many of her opponents to vote for her, to ensure a second round. She thus polled surprisingly well, building an unstoppable momentum that secured the leadership. It is even suggested that her archenemy, Michael Heseltine, voted for Thatcher, not believing she would eventually win.

Neave’s reward from Thatcher was his choice of shadow cabinet positions. Unusually, he asked to take the Northern Ireland portfolio, advocating a tougher line against both wings (military and political) of the IRA. Speeches made in 1976 used material from the former military intelligence officer, Colin Wallace, and he was particularly interested in evidence of Soviet support for the republican movement.

His support for the policy of establishing a power-sharing devolved administration in Ulster was somewhat ambivalent. After a visit in 1976 from the Irish foreign minister, Garret Fitzgerald, Thatcher publicly reaffirmed Tory support for the policy, and Neave met the moderate nationalist SDLP the following February to reassure them. He also condemned the second Ulster Workers Council strike in May 1977, which was designed to force a British government rethink. However, by January 1978 he was saying that power-sharing was “no longer practical politics”, although he later suggested he meant the failed Sunningdale model.

In a 1977 debate, he called for terrorist killing to be a capital offence. After the IRA bombing of the La Mon Hotel in 1978, causing severe civilian loss of life, he said: “There may be 100 or 200 really hard men, who are known to our intelligence services. It is these people whom we have to get, and only special services troops can do it.” This was interpreted in some quarters as support for a “shoot to kill” policy.

Neave’s savage murder, on March 30th, 1979, has spawned many conspiracy theories. A mercury tilt-switch bomb, placed on the underside of his car, exploded as he drove up the ramp of the House of Commons car park. The explosion of about one pound of Soviet-manufactured material blew out the doors, windows and bonnet. His legs were severed and he was unrecognisable, dying in hospital one hour later.

The Provisional I.R.A. initially claimed responsibility (yet another debunking of the honest Provo myth), but it soon emerged that the communist republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army, had the more plausible claim. Its “director of intelligence”, Ronnie Bunting, was credited with ordering the murder. He claimed to have had inside information from the House of Commons allowing the bombers to infiltrate the car park, but it is just as likely that the device was planted, with a time delay, outside Neave’s home, where security was slack.

The bombers have never been brought to justice. Since he was Mrs. Thatcher’s close friend and trusted lieutenant, one would assume that heaven and earth would be moved to find his killers. Photofits were issued and suspects were rounded up. The chief suspect was said to be “a top republican bomber and master of disguise” who was on the run since being sprung from gaol in Dublin by the I.R.A. in 1976.

A Roman Catholic priest, Father Vincent Ford, became a suspect. From Sligo, this fanatical republican had been a priest in New York State before returning to Ireland and becoming involved with the I.N.L.A. and its political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison in March 1981 by a special criminal court in Dublin for leading a bank raid. A leaked Special Branch report introduced a second suspect, believed to be Brendan O’Sullivan, an I.R.S.P. member from Killorgin, Co. Kerry. (Mail on Sunday 24/7/1983)

The Sunday Telegraph, on September 5th 1982, named two I.N.L.A. members as being linked with Neave’s murder. They were Michael Oliver Plunkett and Stephen King, who had just been arrested in France, along with Mary Reid. Plunkett, born in 1951, had been a member of Official Sinn Fein before helping to found the I.R.S.P. A close associate of its leader, Seamus Costello, he had been on the run from the Irish police since 1979 and was a suspect in the murder of Sir Christopher Sykes, ambassador to The Hague, in that year. Charges against the “Vincennes Three” were eventually dropped, and the author clearly does not believe they were the murderers of Airey Neave. In 1989, Plunkett, King and Reid sued for wrongful arrest and were awarded one franc damages.

In the spring of 1981, Geoffrey Sloane, a research student at Keele University, interviewed Clive Abbott, a senior official at the Northern Ireland Office. He forecast a discreet role for the United States in a “final settlement”, which was likely to be “a confederal Ireland” in which Dublin would participate. This civil servant’s briefing carries the strong suggestion that America was already secretly involved. Enoch Powell, M.P. for South Down, claimed in an interview in January 1984 that the C.I.A. had been responsible for a number of assassinations, including those of Airey Neave, Lord Mountbatten and Neave’s friend and Unionist colleague, Robert Bradford M.P. In the Guardian, on 12/3/1984, Powell claimed that the police were convinced of “the effective existence of a policy and motivation outside and above the IRA and INLA” which had led to “a series of assassinations which can be distinguished from the run-of-the-mill murders of persons connected with the security forc! es”.

It was therefore seen as significant that Neave’s successor, Humphrey Atkins, soon after becoming Ulster Secretary, proposed talks on Northern Ireland’s future with the US and Irish governments in New York. Although this particular proposal met with resistance and was dropped, this process would lead to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Airey Neave was seen as implacably opposed to surrendering British sovereignty in this way, and his removal was important to the Irish government and their American friends.

In 1986 Powell went further, earning the wrath of many Tories (and sections of the media with Intelligence connections) when he rejected the INLA claims of Neave’s murder and suggested it had been carried out by “high contracting parties” linked to “MI6 and their friends”.

Another interesting theory is given coverage by Routledge in this very readable study. The investigative writer Kevin Cahill told the author that Neave had spoken, in an off-guard moment in March 1979, of “a cleaning of the Augean stables. There has been serious corruption”. Cahill got the impression that Neave was primarily concerned with the security services themselves, not just their Ulster operations.

Cahill later became research assistant to the Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown. Becoming friendly with House of Commons security staff, he discovered that most of them assumed Neave’s murder to have been an “inside job”. Cahill believes that Neave threatened senior figures in the intelligence establishment, who decided to get rid of him before he reached 10 Downing Street as Mrs. Thatcher’s intelligence co-ordinator.

Gerald James, former chief of the ordnance firm Astra Holdings, who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the government in the “arms to Iraq” controversy, had also been involved in the right-wing groups suspicious of Harold Wilson’s alleged Soviet leanings. He agrees that Neave had decided to clean up the intelligence services, and made the mistake of being too open about it. James also told Routledge “The man he was going to make head of MI6 got machine-gunned on his own doorstep.” This is a reference to Sir Christopher Sykes, which, once again, links the two murders. And Neave’s intended head of MI5, Christopher Tugendhat, was also the subject of an assassination attempt.

Enoch Powell was not alone in alleging CIA involvement. Gerald James makes the very interesting suggestion that certain elements of MI6, inter-related with the CIA, have gone into private business, with money in secret bank accounts. They were sufficiently ruthless to eliminate those who threatened their positions, and Irish republicans provided the perfect cover. Fantastic? Perhaps…

Further reading:

• Airey Neave, "Saturday at MI9," Hodder & Stoughton, 1969.

• Airey Neave, "They Have Their Exits," Coronet Books, 1970.

• Reinhold Eggers, "Colditz: The German Story," Robert Hale, 1991.

• Patrick Cosgrave, "The Lives of Enoch Powell," Pan Books, 1990.

• Norah Bradford, "A Sword Bathed in Heaven," Pickering & Inglis, 1984.

• Gerald James, "In the Public Interest," Warner Books, 1998.

• Observer, 19/10/1986.