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wherever you get your podcasts. This is True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhiannon Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. MI9 Unmasked
Part 1. Escape and Evasion. East Germany, January 5th, 1942. At the impregnable Nazi fortress, Kolditz Castle. Guards whittle away the late-night hours, puffing on cigarettes. Idle small talk echoes along the medieval corridors. Some 400 miles from the nearest German border... The castle houses some of the war's highest ranking British and French POWs. The Nazi regime believed it was impossible to escape. A fortress built on bedrock.
It was impenetrable. There was no way anyone was going to escape. Indeed, over two years into the war, no prisoner had escaped Colditz. Not for long, anyway. There'd been a lot of attempts previously to escape from Colditz and they'd been recaptured. At midnight, the sentries posted at the castle's main entrance spot two officers exiting the guardhouse.
and approach them in immaculate uniforms and speaking perfect german the officers receive the sentries salute and walk past heading out of the castle within a few seconds The pair have slipped out of sight. A few hours later, all hell has broken loose. As it turns out, the two men weren't German officers at all. They weren't even Germans. They were the very captives the guards were meant to be keeping under lock and key. The two of them effectively walk out of Kolditz in German army uniform.
Launching a huge search party, the Nazis scour every nearby village, town and train service. After several days, though, nothing. Before long, the two POWs are back in England. the first men to ever escape from Colditz Castle. And not only that, one of the men goes on to run the very organisation that helped him escape in the first place. MI9 Highly secret. So secret was it. So sensitive that nobody knew about really in any detail until the files were declassified just a decade or so ago.
In this episode of True Spies, you'll hear all about the fascinating history of MI9, the British intelligence outfit that rescued tens of thousands of Allied soldiers during World War II. German forces had overrun much of Western Europe. 50,000 British soldiers were trapped behind enemy lines and they couldn't get out, were taken off to prisoner of war camps. And that's the side of the story we don't hear about.
very well, but MI9 was about to kick in and help them. And you'll also hear how MI9 inspired one of the most iconic characters in espionage history, the eccentric gadget geek Q. of James Bond fame. We've all grown up on the James Bond films or Fleming's novels. We love it. And I just assumed he had a really colourful imagination. But when you start diving into the MI9 files, you think Ian Fleming has actually drawn on real-life events. I mean, unbelievable. What a legacy.
As war broke out across Europe in 1939, British intelligence knew it had a problem. The airmen and soldiers, if they're trapped behind enemy lines or they bail out of their aircraft... they wouldn't necessarily think about how to get back to the UK. It wasn't necessarily obvious if you're disorientated and you're facing capture or you're even in a prisoner of war camp.
How do you escape? How do you make sure you don't give yourself away? This is Helen Fry, an intelligence historian and author of MI9. a history of the Secret Service for escape and evasion in World War II. Helen has interviewed several descendants of MI9 personnel all over Europe, noting that the problem of captured and stranded pilots
was at the forefront of British concerns as the country entered the war. You cannot replace in particular your air force that quickly. And the realisation or the knowledge... that Germany could have air superiority. You could not allow that to happen. And that's why it was the greatest priority to bring your fighting forces back. But this wasn't just a personnel issue.
It was also a major financial one. That's one of the key things that underpins these whole operations, realising that our airmen and pilots, you can't train them. In less than three months, they're very expensive to train as well. So much so that £15,000 was needed to train every pilot. That's around £800,000 today. And in wartime...
funds were a constant concern. This conundrum, combined with the inevitable raft of downed airmen and cornered troops the war would create, saw the British set up an organization in December 1939. To pre-empt the problem, MI9. Training, psychology and escape lines would be really vital for MI9. And that's why it was formed specifically for that task.
Charged with building escape lines throughout Europe, MI9 would spirit downed airmen and captured soldiers out of Nazi territory and back to Britain. To fight another day. And as MI9 was created... So too was a direct order to all Allied servicemen. There was a mandate to escape. First of all, do not be captured. But if you are captured, find ways to escape. With the war gaining speed across the continent...
MI9 ramped up its operations. At Wilton Park, a grand country estate some 20 miles west of London, Britain's newest intelligence organization, set up training courses for British pilots and soldiers. How to escape, how to hide behind enemy lines. The lessons ranged from writing encoded letters from captivity...
to learning the best crossing points on the border from France into neutral Spain. But Britain's newest intelligence organisation knew it needed to do more than just give out geography lessons. Stranded Allied soldiers needed a fighting chance of first surviving and then escaping. Which meant giving them the best possible tools. Maps, compasses, water bottles and the rest.
often in minuscule, easily disguised form. So MI9 formed a unit to devise and produce all of these contraptions. Its name? Q-Branch. And the head of MI9? found just the right man to run it. An officer by the name of Christopher Clayton Hutton. Clutty as he was known, that was his nickname. He was a bit of a maverick who could think outside the box. He was also rather eccentric.
Upon interviewing him for the real-life role of Q, the head of MI9 reported that this bespectacled, slightly odd man couldn't possibly be expected to follow normal service discipline. No matter. For Clayton Hutton's brilliance was soon becoming apparent. The compasses, the army compasses in particular, are huge. They're heavy. They're going to be confiscated as soon as anyone's taken prisoner.
So Clutty came up with a solution. Devise the idea of these tiny compasses, which are really no bigger than a thumbnail. They're so tiny. And they were hidden in ordinary objects like the shaving brush. or in the top button of the service personnel's uniform. Every serviceman and some of the women who went into action where they could be captured actually had a miniature compass in their top button.
And not only that... Clutty realised, well, the Germans could find this. So what we're going to do is to access that, you unscrew the button the wrong way. I love that. MI9 did everything backwards. And the Germans didn't find those and they were hidden in whatever we could hide them in. I mean, I just think that's so clever. But to give you an idea of the scale of this, 1.4...
million miniature compasses were made for MI9. Clutty was soon in high demand. Everyone started asking for ingenious new contraptions. But these requests were merely a nuisance to a mind like Clutty's. So he built himself a private bunker at Wilton Park, underground. So that he was out of the way of prying eyes to just go ahead and think outside the box and do whatever he felt he needed to do. And the genius inventions kept on coming. Take this, for example.
Airmen were already given civilian clothes so they could blend in if shot down. After all, you were hardly going to pass off as a local farmer while wearing an RAF jacket. But there was still one problem. Your boots are going to give you away. Again, Clutty had an answer. He created the special airman's boots, whereby you sort of detach. the main part of the boot and then it looks like a civilian shoe. And this shoe also had another function. He would hide...
The grot wire, for silent killing, hide that in a shoelace. Again, you wouldn't really detect this stuff. But perhaps Clutty's most important work was on the airman's escape pack.
the box that every pilot would carry. Eventually settling on a commercially manufactured plastic cigar case, he managed to fit inside the following. 24 tablets of sweets, a pack of chewing gum, a chocolate bar, a matchbox, a miniature Soren compass, cash, a map of Germany and northern France, a water bottle with 24 purifying tablets, and, because tired eyes might just cost lives,
10 Benzedrine tablets, amphetamines to you and me. And again, it has to be very, very tiny. So he would experiment with little boxes and things like that. Tucked away in his underground bunker, though. Clutty's work in achieving such feats didn't always give him the peace and quiet he had hoped for. He was experimenting with all kinds of things and things went a bit pear-shaped when he accidentally blew up part of his bunker. So it didn't always go according to plan. Nonetheless...
The escape pack fast became one of Q Branch's most successful inventions, which was just as well, for the British were soon faced with disaster. In May 1940, over 300,000 British troops were cornered at Dunkirk, north-eastern France. Mainly the British Expeditionary Force. Trapped between the Channel and the Nazi advance,
The Allied forces looked set to be wiped out less than a year into the war. German forces had overrun much of Western Europe. While the story of what happens next is now legend... A civilian armada rescuing most of the men right off the beach. The picture for MI9 still couldn't have been more urgent. We tend to think of the evacuation at Dunkirk in May, June 1940.
as being hugely successful which it was we got something like over 300 000 of our troops back but 50 000 british soldiers were trapped behind enemy lines and they couldn't get out were taken off to prisoner of war camps. And that's a side of the story we don't hear about. One of these soldiers was a man by the name of Jimmy Langley.
Jimmy Langley had been involved with those forces that were holding back or at least protecting areas from German advance. And he was wounded in action. He was in hospital for a short time, taken prisoner of war. But the Germans did take him to a military hospital. Badly injured after a shell hit the cottage he'd been hiding out in, Langley eventually had his arm amputated in captivity. But that didn't dampen his resolve.
And it wasn't long before he was thinking about escaping because the British intelligence services had taught our personnel, if you're captured, find ways to escape. And while recuperating at a German processing camp, Langley spotted his chance. The night before the base was due to move to Germany, the guards held a cocktail party for themselves.
Amid the drunken clamour, Langley escaped via the Porter's Lodge before being sheltered by a local French priest. Linking up with a local resistance network... Langley eventually scarpered down to the French Riviera via Paris, crossing over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain in March 1941. But he eventually escapes and makes it back to the UK. and the British were desperate to hear what Langley had to say.
It's not just about escape and evasion, but our prisoners are valuable sources of intelligence. Those who have escaped, those who are evading capture, can actually bring back eyewitness accounts of what they've seen behind enemy lines. After all, MI9 had barely had a chance to even set up the escape lines out of Nazi-controlled Europe, let alone fully operate and refine them. And Langley...
after being told his injuries ruled him out of a return to active service, was ordered to report to the Savoy Hotel that very afternoon. He was scheduled to meet an unknown contact there. And he would only identify this figure by a rose in the lapel of this man's jacket. Crossing the hotel foyer, Langley spots his man. White hair, blue eyes...
A general air of benevolence, he later said. But the latter was quickly replaced by a less welcoming response. Takes one sort of look at Jimmy Langley and says, just like his father. As it turns out, this wasn't some sort of coded message. The man had, in fact, worked with Langley's father in intelligence back in World War I. The pair share small talk and a couple of dry martinis.
Eventually getting up to leave, Langley is none the wiser about what on earth the meeting is about, or who the man opposite him is. But while making his goodbyes, Langley does get one instruction. Broadway Buildings, St James' Park, Monday morning. Be there. And that day he walked out having been recruited like that for MI9.
Langley immediately got to it, working with contacts from northern France and Belgium all the way to Marseille, Madrid, Gibraltar and Lisbon, all to build out effective escape lines. They had a mechanism through secret messages and transmissions that they knew someone was coming out down the lines. A typical tactic involved having someone in an official position orchestrate the line. Using their work...
as a front for moving and sheltering Allied of aiders. One such person was the American representative to the French Vichy Armistice Commission, another an official at the neutral Iranian legation. In turn, they would recruit locals sympathetic to the Allies, building networks of safe houses stretching across Europe, moving them under cover of darkness on routes wildly off the beaten track.
I would reiterate the sheer bravery of the men and women behind enemy lines. Some of them were just 16, 17, 18 when they're risking their lives. because occasionally, unfortunately, those escape lines were compromised. They were betrayed, sometimes by people who'd infiltrated them. or people who'd been captured and turned by the Germans under torture. So the risks for those families, for those men and women that were doing that, was that they themselves could be rounded up and...
you know, they'd lose their lives, which they did, either shot or sent to concentration camps when they died. There were some survivors, so there were risks, incredibly brave. Even today. The fog of war shrouds the real beginnings of these famed escape lines. In terms of setting up the lines, it's really tricky to have a precise history. It looks like those that were favourable.
towards the Allies, actually set up the escape lines themselves and then hooked up with MI9. I'm not convinced that MI9 itself set up all of them. One thing was undoubtedly clear about these escape lines. As one local operative told Helen Fry herself. She said, we didn't know really who we were working for. We were just working for the line. We called it the line.
She said it was only after the war that we realised it was MI9. Under Jimmy Langley, MI9's escape lines became fully fledged. You have famously the comet line. And that ran from Brussels all the way across to Paris, through Paris, all the way down the far side towards the far side of the Pyrenees. And then Spain allegedly neutral, but it was still quite a dangerous place if you're a prisoner.
There was a sea route, the Shelburne Line, which went from Cornwall, southwest of England, to Brittany. And then there was another route, in fact, the earliest route. which ran from Marseille in the south over the near side of the Pyrenees. So those were the three main MI9 escape lines that we know about in that part of Western Europe. Listening to the routes these escape lines took...
You may be wondering, why so circuitous? Why not go the shortest route from northern Europe across the Channel? Well, there was a very good reason for that. The Germans were looking at ports and other means out. They knew that our guys were escaping. They knew they were getting back. And so they would watch the obvious places and the obvious points on the border. So the escape lines have to be, well, often in many cases, quite some distance.
With Jimmy Langley overseeing the counterintuitively long-distance escape lines and Christopher Clayton Hutton of Q Branch creating ingenious escape and evasion contraptions, MI9 began getting large numbers of downed airmen back to Britain, and often extraordinarily quickly, hence the comet line's name. Because of the speed at which...
Somebody, you know, one of our airmen or soldiers hidden in the forests around Brussels were actually made it back to the UK. Initially, it was around 12 days, which was still deemed to be pretty good. especially given the distances that are involved. I believe the fastest was in four days. That's four days from being shot down in northern France, being picked up by the comet line's local operatives.
transported via Paris some 500 miles to the Pyrenees and crossing that mountain range away from the regular routes. That's no mean feat to be going over the Pyrenees. All that... before rendezvousing with MI9's man in northern Spain, who then transports the escapees across the entire length of the country to Gibraltar, and then, finally, home.
That was a huge morale boost to those that were about to go into action or facing another mission. They knew that there was somebody who would support them. So it wasn't that they were going into action and they were fighting on their own. behind enemy lines, for survival, there was this organisation. Of course, they didn't know it was called MI9. And as morale boosts go, the escape of one British soldier became the stuff of legend. His name?
Aerie Neve. Aerie Neve was a real leadership figure, really. He was a very strong character. And if anyone was going to try to escape from anywhere, it would be Aerie Neve. So he'd been captured and as an officer had been taken to Colditz. Colditz Castle. A place everyone thought impossible to escape from. Except those who'd gone through MI9 training.
MI9 taught our officers to believe that there was not such a thing as never, because Airy Neve becomes the first British officer to successfully escape from Colditz. and make it back to the UK. But how on earth did Airy Neve, a British POW, simply walk past the guards and out of Colditz prison? Well... For a start, the Allies were allowed to mail packages into the POW camps. Prisoners were allowed to receive items through the Red Cross or other parcels from quote-unquote charities.
MI9 decided to create these fake charities and they printed letters with headed notepaper, the Vitchellers Association. didn't exist the ladies knitting society and things like that the benevolent airman society whatever it was they thought of and then they would write this letter Dear prisoner, we hope you like the socks or we hope you like whatever it is they're sending in. And it would go in this package, the blanket, whatever it was they're sending in.
And it just looked like someone had been very kind and generous. But that whole creation of, and the illusion really, that nothing is what it seems. And the Germans never discovered. that those charities were fake. But with Christopher Clayton Hutton's Q branch masterminding these parcels, innocuous items like blankets could be made to be immensely useful.
Our prisoners knew that if you dipped that blanket in a special... bucket of solution so they'd go into the kitchens often late at night do that the pattern of a german uniform would emerge and the blankets were a particular color that were the closest to a particular uniform whether it's a german officer or german general whatever you're going to fake. In the case if you're coming out as a German general, they would use the red shorts that they were issued as prisoners of war.
Germans gave them red shorts when they're exercising so that they could see if they escaped into the woods or whatever. You see them a mile off. But the prisoners cut this up and made the strip down the trousers, which of course is what a German general has. And not only that. They're creating fake guns out of chocolate. They use a chocolate mould. And they are so inventive. MI9 soon becomes an industrial operation.
sourcing everything from blankets for mock uniforms to miniature maps and radios. Much of the contraband gets through to places like Kaldit, hidden in chess pieces. Inside the knight, you could unscrew the head of the knight. the wrong way and that would open up because the cavity inside which was lined and they could put some kind of ink or special fluid and just transport that across
They tip it in the bucket of water, put your blanket in, and out comes the pattern of a German uniform. Whatever it is they're sending in, they could hide like that. And they used any raft of board games to do that, including darts. anything they could think of. Thanks to the brilliance of Q Branch and the generosity of fake charities, Airy Neve now had a full German officer's uniform, complete with a chocolate gun. One night...
After 9pm roll call, Niamh and a fellow inmate donned their Nazi uniforms and broke through the ceiling of their sleeping quarters. Freely walking through the castle, they eventually reached the guardhouse. before filing out onto the drawbridge. Given both men's impeccable uniforms and German, they were merely saluted while walking right past into the German countryside. And once out of sight... They shed their German uniforms to reveal Dutch electrical workmen's overalls.
that they have made themselves with attention to detail. And that's a fascinating side of the life inside the camps, whether it's Colditz or any of the other prisoner of war camps. There was a whole industry going on. This was no coincidence. Thanks to MI9, Niamh had learned that such electrical workers were allowed to travel through Germany. And so, within a few days...
The pair take several trains unhindered and make it to the British attaché in neutral Switzerland. From there, they are smuggled across the French border, down the pat line to Marseille, Perpignan. and over the Pyrenees into Spain, all in secret. These are clandestine operations. You cannot be captured escorting airmen or soldiers out because you'll just be shot.
Eventually arriving back in the UK via a troop ship from Gibraltar, Niamh was given a hero's welcome. After debriefing, he's introduced to one Jimmy Langley. joining him in running the very MI9 escape lines they themselves had both used. But we certainly know that they were orchestrating all kinds of...
drops of agents into all kinds of places in Europe including the Balkans, a very difficult area. So they're infiltrating not just France, which is somewhere we think of, but in other difficult parts of Europe. of the one-armed Jimmy Langley and famed Kolditz escapee Airy Neve gets to work. Building out and refining the escape line networks even further,
They're backed up in their efforts by the ingenuity of Clayton Hutton and Q Branch. And Niamh's experience using the escape line brings him to one simple but brilliant idea. He interestingly sends a message to the Belgians and says, why don't you use more female agents? They make really good agents. It's around this time he's appealing to other allied governments, use the women.
It's an idea that the Belgian escape line network and others duly take on. This is part of his legacy. He had that vision. But before long, disaster strikes. In late 1942, the Maréchal family, key members of the Comet Line network in Brussels, received a letter notifying them that two American airmen would be arriving later that day.
Already the situation seemed odd. Such messages were always sent by postcard for one, and with a few days' notice. But before the Marischal family could do anything, The airmen were at their door. Taking them in, they served supper. The airmen seemed subdued, distant. Then they asked to go for a walk. An unusual request for those in hiding. The risks, they are aware of the risks, they're very great. But with no way to stop them, the family let the airmen go.
Within a few minutes, there's a loud knock on the door. Opening it, Madame Maréchal is greeted by a German secret policeman pointing a revolver. The game is up, he shouts. rounding the family into the back of a police van. That's it for that family, Elsie Marachal's family. She and her mother survived, but other members of the family do not. The family... along with a hundred other comet line operatives, had been burned. All by one British double agent, Harold Cole.
notorious betrayer and his background's a bit suspect anyway what his motives were and who he was really working for but he would take fake airmen into the houses of these men and women so he would dress up somebody in American Air Force uniform, and pretend they were escaping. And there's no defense against that. However secure those escape lines think they are, there is no...
real defence against someone doing that. The greatest vulnerability of those lines is not the distance, it's betrayal. Back at MI9, Langley and Neve were incandescent. at Harold Cole's betrayal. Neve ordered him to be killed on sight. I think it's the only shoot to kill order that I found in the files because it was realised what he'd done. But in the chaos of war-torn Europe, coal disappeared. Next time on True Spies. MI9 Part 2. The heat and the hunt is on.
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Trains packed with Allied POWs begin to race north. Sam Derry decides it's now or never. Derry forces open a sliding door and jumps. With the German officers shooting at him, he tumbles down the bank. Then he walks to a nearby farm, getting food and shelter from the locals. And what they have to tell him astonishes the British officer. Hundreds of fellow escapers are hiding out in the hills. Particularly around Rome.
And before long, the Resistance Network have a message for him. Your superior would like to meet you, the message reads. And who might that superior be? All Derry gets is his nickname. The Scarlet Pimpernel. And that's when Sam Derry finds himself being hauled into the Vatican. True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.