MI9 Unmasked, Part 2: Italian Jobs | WW2
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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 Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. True Spies MI9 Unmasked. Part 2. Italian Jobs. September 1943. Chieti, central Italy. At POW prison camp 21, a British officer, 29-year-old Sam Derry, is shuttling his men through makeshift tunnels.

Tunnels that lead under the high barbed wire fence and into the nearby forest. He was the senior officer that had been captured. So if you were the senior ranking officer, you automatically took charge of the escape branch within that camp. Over the past few days, his efforts have proved to be wildly successful. He'd saved, you know, over 50 men at one point.

And Derry was far from finished. He was utterly determined not to escape himself before all of the men had successfully escaped. So he was going to be the last man standing. But now, counterintuitively, Derry has a serious problem. The Allies are making their way up through Italy...

The invasion of Sicily. 2,000 ships bringing great armies of battle-hardened British, Americans and Canadians. Within weeks, the Italians have signed an unconditional surrender with the Allies. While meant to be good news, it was anything but to POWs like Derry. Soon, they would have new masters.

The Germans take over as the new guards. Flooding Italy with several divisions, the Nazis also reclaim much of the country, re-establishing a puppet state headed by Mussolini. At the same time, the Germans make another drastic move.

They decide, with even the slow advance of the Allies, they're going to move all of the remaining prisoners to an unknown destination in Germany. And we know that some prisoners made it into concentration camps, so this is a really dangerous moment. Trains packed with Allied POWs begin to race north. On one convoy, Sam Derry decides it's now or never. Asking the guard if he can go to the toilet, Derry heads towards the cubicle.

Inside, he sees the window is boarded up and it's far too small to fit through regardless. But stepping back into the main carriage, Derry sees the guard is toward the other end. Darting in the opposite direction, Derry forces open a sliding door and jumps. With the German officers shooting at him, they just narrowly miss his leg. He tumbles down the bank. He does injure his leg. Hiding in a haystack,

Derry doesn't move for several days. 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. Helped by local resistance, Derry makes his way to them.

And before long, the resistance network have a message for him. It's gone through the network that this senior British officer who's escaped whilst being transported to Germany. 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.

In this, the second part of True Spy's MI9 special, you'll hear how the intelligence network operated in one of the most complex, unpredictable arenas of World War II, Nazi-occupied Italy. These stories, they are extraordinary. You can't make this stuff up. As British officer Sam Derry sat among the hundreds of escapers and evaders in the hills outside Rome,

He pondered how on earth he might enter the city undetected to meet this mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel. By this point, Italy's capital was swarming with Nazi soldiers. Soldiers that were on high alert for the hordes of Allied personnel that dotted the country uncaptured. What are we going to do? How are we going to hide Sam Derry? Eventually, one of the local farmers tells Derry he's making one of his regular trips into the city to sell his produce.

Immediately, Derry spots an opportunity. Hiding underneath all sorts of sundries, the farmer carts Derry into central Rome. Stopping at a religious college adjoining the Vatican City state, Derry climbs out of the farm cart straight into a side door. There he meets the man who sent for him, the scarlet Pimpernel himself.

The Catholic priest called Hugh O'Flaherty. The Nazi police chief of Rome himself had dubbed O'Flaherty the Scarlet Pimpernel, nicknaming him after the title character in an old novel who constantly evades the trap set out for him, mastering the art of disguise in the process. And now the Scarlet Pimpernel is going to help Sam Derry do the same.

And Sam Derry, who's actually a Lutheran, so he's part of the Protestant tradition. He knows nothing about Catholicism. No matter, O'Flaherty says, presenting Derry with a cardinal's uniform. Donning his new outfit, Derry follows O'Flaherty into the Vatican.

sauntering past any Nazi soldiers he encounters... ...and finds himself having a private audience with Pope Pius XII. And Pius XII doesn't realise he isn't one of his real cardinals. The Vatican was officially neutral, the city-state off-limits to the Nazis. But unofficially, many suspected the Catholic Church of being sympathetic to the Nazi cause...

All of which makes what Derry witnessed next all the more incredible.

One of the most, I think, the most extraordinary discoveries is that, in fact, the Vatican authorised funds, financial assistance to help MI9 that was having difficulty smuggling money into Italy to support the black market, buying food, extra food, that kind of thing. And Pope Pius XII is really clear from foreign office files that he absolutely knew it was going on and he supported it.

Alongside an audience with the Pope, Derry also meets the chief British diplomat to the Holy See. There he learns of the Rome Escape Organisation, MI9's outpost in the chaos of Nazi-controlled Italy. That Rome Escape Organisation was then run from September '43 from inside the Vatican. Hearing of the hundreds of Allied men stranded in the hills around Rome

O'Flaherty and the diplomat put their money where their mouth is. Derry leaves with some 50,000 lira in cash to hand out to the evaders and an invitation to run the Rome Escape Organization alongside the Scarlet Pimpernel. After being smuggled back into the hills outside the city, Derry hands out the cash to desperate evaders.

And before long, he sees just how deeply rooted the resistance to fascism is in the very country that spawned it. Women who are simply working in the bread mills, what they would do is take a tiny piece of flour aside and this would be used to make food for women.

the prisoners of war in hiding, or they were evading at that point. And the idea of peasant Italian women who have so little to feed their own families that they were prepared to share what they had and to just take a little bit of extra flour from the mill to support our soldiers and airmen. That is a simple act of resistance.

Touched by what he sees among the local population, Derry accepts O'Flaherty's job offer. And together, Hugh O'Flaherty and Sam Derry run the Rome Escape organization. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm

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From his new base in the Vatican, Derry makes contact with MI9 HQ back in London. His main contacts? Jimmy Langley and Airy Neve, who we met in part one of this story. Fellow escapees themselves, Langley and Neve know Derry is just the man for MI9 in Italy, which is just as well.

They themselves are busy elsewhere, consumed by trying to save other Western European escape lines. Escape lines that, you may remember, had been burned by a British soldier, no less. One Harold Cole.

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. A double agent, Cole had now disappeared into the chaos of conflict. Back at MI9 HQ, Langley and Neve were desperately trying to pick up the pieces of all three main escape routes out of Nazi-controlled Europe.

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. The Shelburne Line, which went from Cornwall, southwest of England, to Brittany. And then there was the Pat Line, which ran from Marseille in the south over the near side of the Pyrenees.

For a start, this meant getting as many escape line operatives out as they can, including one woman

called Peggy Van Leer. MI9 realised at one point that she's on a wanted list and they say to her, we've got to get you out. She's not the only example where MI9 had to exfiltrate their own operatives out down the very same escape lines that they'd been operating on. So she was brought out through the Comet line into Spain. But in her case, they had a difficulty getting

because Peggy had really quite vibrant red hair and of course she'd stick out in Spain. You know, we don't normally see red-haired women in Spain. So MI9 got creative.

MI9 decided the best way to get her out of Spain was to smuggle her out in a boat of Seville oranges. So she's hidden amongst all these oranges and the boat makes it down to Gibraltar where I believe she's then put on an aircraft.

Landing in the UK, she was meant to be met by Niamh, but he asked Jimmy Langley to go in his absence. He was off on his honeymoon and he'd said to Jimmy Langley, well, can you meet this woman from the aircraft?

Which he did. And Peggy just had this sixth sense on the flight to the UK that the man she was going to meet at the bottom of the flight of the steps would be her future husband. And it was. They fell in love and they married within the space of six months. With stronger local knowledge of the comet line now available to MI9, thanks to Langley's new wife, he and Neve hastily rework the escape route.

They developed new personnel networks, alternate safe houses, and different paths across the Pyrenees. The Comet line did limp on as a result, but never at the scale it had before its betrayal. Meanwhile, back in the Vatican, Sam Derry and Father O'Flaherty were having stunning success in keeping Allied evaders out of the Axis's grasp.

Capitalising on the goodwill of the locals, they set up safe houses throughout Rome, smuggling men in whenever they could. Several even ended up living in the Vatican City State itself. When it wasn't Vatican policy, it's all about rescue, rescuing those prisoners and those that are hiding. The Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, even wrote a report on the Allied evaders living within the sanctuary of the Vatican.

adding, perhaps a little wryly, that their presence had... That, for me, was one of the most, I think, the most extraordinary discoveries in the research. It's so typical, isn't it, of MI9 thinking that you just hide him in plain sight.

Building a contact book of agents throughout Rome and beyond, Derry and Father O'Flaherty create a network of assistants that eventually spans much of the country. Alongside providing food, cash, and shelter, perhaps the most crucial aid to evaders was on where not to go. And as the network builds across Italy, one other key hub emerges in providing this intel, right in the Nazi heartland of the north.

In Milan, northern Italy, MI9's operation gravitates around one person.

an aristocratic Italian woman called Renata Faticani della Torre. Her family had a villa in the centre of Milan. And again, she's only in her early 20s. She's stunningly beautiful. She was back in Italy. And on her own initiative, she sets up this station within the family home, unknown to her mother.

The Milan hub, centered on Della Torre's villa, becomes known in resistance circles as Stazione Goldoni, after the palatial side street the house sat on. And Renata was perfect as its point woman. Quite a shy person, very intelligent. She'd got a degree. She'd studied in Germany. Easily able to pass as German, Renata openly dealt with Nazi soldiers and police throughout Milan.

eliciting whatever she could on what the Germans knew about the resistance, its personnel and its escape routes. She's fascinating because she realises the importance of collecting intelligence, which she does, and various things are hidden and false documents in the family home, and it was a risk. Back in MI9 HQ in London, Aerie Neve had theorised that women often made the best agents...

Renate proved him right once again. Once, Renate even went to Gestapo headquarters posing as a Nazi agent. Once there, she simply asked for papers on resistance members known to the authorities, papers that were duly handed over to her without so much as a raised eyebrow.

Then, getting the train north, Renata scouted out the best routes over the mountains of Italy into Switzerland, posing as a holidaying skier to any suspicious patrols. You can't use regular routes, you can't even try and cross the border in unsuspecting moments when the guards are looking the other way. You have to find really quite sophisticated and difficult routes out through the mountains. And she did that. Not only that.

Renata hides a printing press in her cavernous villa, behind the curtains of one of the dressing rooms. And by late 1943, Stazione Goldoni in central Milan is processing fake papers for hundreds of Allied evaders, many of whom Renata personally escorts on skis through the snowy peaks of northern Italy into Switzerland. But as her Swiss connections developed,

Renate's operation became much more than an exercise in evasion. She had a multiple task, actually. She's helping escapers, but she's also running this intelligence station for the Allies. She eventually links up with American intelligence in Switzerland. Which soon brings her in contact with America's master spy in Switzerland, one Alan Dulles.

who later becomes one of the early heads of CIA. You can hear all about Alan Dulles in the two-part True Spies special, The Old Man and the CIA.

Renate's work with Dulles had one key goal. Link up with resistance groups in Austria. They'd lost contact because Austria was so isolated, really, from distance. So Italy was a key point where the Allies could try and penetrate into Austria and set up those networks or kickstart them again ahead of the Allied liberating forces.

Dulles cultivates a new agent, an ex-Wehrmacht soldier. He's shuttled down the MI9 route Renate has built in and out of northern Italy, tasked with fomenting and organizing the resistance in Austria. Providing him with cash and fake papers, Dulles and Renate's man eventually discovers an entire Wehrmacht division in Austria that had turned against Hitler, intel that was gold to Dulles and the Allies.

Because as soon as the Allies enter Austria, we knew that ultimately they would liberate Austria, whether it was the Russian troops or American troops, that you have to hook up or at least ahead of that, get some of the stay behind sort of resistant groups to start doing all kinds of things you need them to do, whether it's sabotage or distributing propaganda and resisting Russia.

The division even aided the leaders of the July 1944 assassination plot against Hitler. Although that operation ultimately failed, much of the division managed to go to ground, staying put in Austria ahead of the Allies' invasion.

By this time, MI9's Vatican and Milan hubs had helped over 5,000 Allied escapers and evaders, alongside a number of Jewish refugees and Nazi deserters. And with the escape line still just about operational in Western Europe, MI9 made one final push to get as many people out of Nazi territory as possible. For a very different objective was hoving into view. D-Day.

And they're now preparing, and this is as early as September 1943, so we're nine months ahead of D-Day, when there's all kinds of preparations for D-Day happening. D-Day, 6th of June, of course, 1944.

With D-Day set to be the largest invasion force in history, it was essential that the Allied personnel who had not yet been exfiltrated were out of harm's way. Even this late in the war, MI9 was thinking about the safety of its personnel. They didn't abandon its personnel to stand on their own two feet during the invasion.

And there was one issue that concerned MI9 above any other. When the Germans realised, and there was some realisation even in 43 that they were losing the war, what happens when we get close to D-Day and after D-Day, when the Germans realise, you know, the war is over, are they going to start shooting our prisoners of war in the camps? And it was a real debate and concern. At MI9 HQ in England, though, Airy Neve knew that as D-Day approached...

Getting stranded allies out of continental Europe would become just too problematic, too dangerous. You can't start exfiltrating any of your escapers and evaders around D-Day because there's too much going on. They could get caught up in the fighting, they could get injured, but also there was a concern that some of them might think, oh, blow this, I'm going to join that regiment and fight with them, and they didn't want this utter confusion. So Niamh comes up with a plan.

an operation that's codenamed Operation Marathon. It would set up a secret camp in the forest, not far from Reims, and anyone who was sort of trapped in that area ahead of the advancing Allied forces could hide in safety. So the operation initially was to find a

a safe area away from the fighting when they thought roughly where the fighting would be all evacuations by sea had to cease just a few days before D-Day as the D-Day landings eventually begin Niamh's plan works brilliantly hundreds of people who mi9 hadn't had time to rescue found a Haven deep in the forest far from the forward path of the invasion

Meanwhile, the Allies had liberated Rome just two days earlier, allowing Father of Flachity to finally walk around the city as a free man, no longer in disguise, no longer looking over his shoulder, no longer the scarlet pimpernel.

By this point, however, he was without his partner Sam Derry. He'd returned to the UK to head up the whole of MI9. He was seen as a really, really important leader, actually, to lead MI9 into the latter stages of the war and just into the early period of peace and reconstruction of Europe. Renata Fanzini della Torre, head of MI9's Milan hub, was eventually to taste freedom too.

But along the way, she'd face a hiccup. She does get captured towards the end of the war. But as one of MI9's top operators, Renate slips the net. She's stunningly beautiful, so she uses her beauty to sort of charm the prison guards. Manages to bribe her way out. Using the very escape route she built herself, Renate escapes out of Italy to Switzerland until the Nazi regime's complete collapse.

After the liberation of Italy and the stunning success of D-Day,

MI9 commander Arie Neve himself went to France to collect the remaining evaders hiding out in Reims, northeast of Paris, under orders of Operation Marathon. Arie Neve knew exactly where it was and when it was safe to do so, he personally came over and liberated that secret camp in the forest. It's quite a touching moment and one in a touching moment for Arie Neve as well, actually.

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Following D-Day and Operation Marathon, MI9 continued its work aiding escapers, evaders and local resistance operatives. Neve followed the Allies' advance east across Europe, collecting further escapees along the way. Eventually, he made it to Paris, where he met none other than Ernest Hemingway, before landing in Brussels, arriving at the city's Hotel Metropole.

he encountered some 100 survivors of the Comet Line network. A riotous party ensued. The next day, a little worse for wear, even the unflappable Neve was taken aback at the bar bill. So, he forwarded it to the headquarters of General Eisenhower. Aside from boozy reunions, Neve eventually got word of the man who'd betrayed several of MI9's escape routes and top operatives.

British double agent Harold Cole. He'd been spotted in Paris just before liberation, riding in a German staff car in full Nazi uniform before disappearing again. He does manage to survive. That is, until some months after the war in Europe ends, when the Allied police issued an arrest or kill order for Cole. Two French officers eventually get a tip. Cole is in a Parisian bar, drinking with a mistress.

Converging on the bar, the police call for Cole to give himself up. Pulling out a gun, Cole opens fire. In a consequent gunfight, Cole is eventually shot dead. Aerie Neve later wrote that Cole was "among the most selfish and callous traitors who ever served the enemy in time of war." One of the women betrayed by Cole spoke to Helen Fry shortly before her 100th birthday.

one Elsie Maréchal of Brussels, who to this day still respects the code of secrecy intrinsic to a true spy's work.

She said it was only after the war that we realised it was MI9. So they are given the knowledge that you were working for the British intelligence services, they were supporting all of this, which was great to have that closure for them, but they couldn't talk about it because the files are still classified. And so you find that in some of these memoirs, they talk about some of what they did, but they were asked for the identity of other helpers and that to be kept silent.

Indeed, Renata Fancini Dellatore, the heroine of MI-19's Milan network, turned down all medals offered by the Allies after the war, along with several TV and film adaptations of her life. Much of the detail of her work with Allen Dulles and American intelligence remains classified to this day.

The security goes on even into the next period, which was as dangerous war, many would argue, of the Cold War itself. But the secrecy, the levels of secrecy had to be maintained up to a point. The secrecy even extended to Renata's daughter, who told Helen Fry that she knew next to nothing about MI9 Stazioni Goldoni, nor her mother's running of it, until Helen told her the story.

Indeed, there are suggestions that Renate carried on working with American intelligence after the war's end. So you never quite know what happens beyond that. What we do know is that as war in Europe wound down, MI9's now head, Sam Derry, received an order that speaks to the same issue. Keeping a guard up in expectation of conflict with the Soviets.

to set up the territorial SAS, a sort of reserve unit of that. Perhaps it's, you know, a recognition that under different circumstances, maybe Sam Derry himself could have been in the SAS. He certainly had the qualities, you know, unorthodox warfare, leaping out of trains and that kind of thing. The man who gave Derry that order personally? Winston Churchill.

Federri and his old partner in the Rome escape organization, Father O'Flaherty,

Their time in Rome was a job well done. The official files say they went on to save over 4,000 Allied personnel in Italy. I mean, that's in one section of the files. It could even be higher, you know, in files that we don't have yet or areas that, you know, we haven't uncovered. But that in itself was an incredible legacy and a part of Italian history of the wartime war.

After VE Day, Father O'Flaherty put the conflict behind him in more ways than one. He became friendly with the very man who gave him his nickname, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Nazi police chief of Rome. O'Flaherty visited him every month in prison, even baptizing him in the Catholic faith. But what of Jimmy Langley, Airy Neve, and Christopher Clayton Hutton, a.k.a. Q.?

the men so integral to MI9's success? Well, perhaps their legacy is best told in the numbers too. Fortunately, we know precisely how many were rescued because the MI9 war diary and its other files actually record how many were rescued. Legacy is enormous. 35,000 Allied personnel were rescued as a result of MI9.

In recognition of his war hero status, combined with his being a qualified lawyer, Eyrie Neve was even given the honor of personally serving the official indictments to the top 21 Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. He was just 29 years old.

Eventually, Neve went on to become an MP, where his mantra that a woman was often the best person for the job took on an equally historic political dimension. He did support the ability of women at a time when it wasn't like that for women. He had that vision and he goes on to support that.

the candidacy and then my understanding is it was he that really sort of persuaded Margaret Thatcher the British first female British prime minister to become the first female British Prime Minister Aerie Neve never lived to see Thatcher actually enter 10 Downing Street however on March the 4th 1979 he was assassinated in a car bomb attack outside the British houses of Parliament

The Irish National Liberation Army claimed responsibility. But, thanks in part to our very own Helen Fry, his, and everyone involved in MI9's lives, will be remembered for some time yet. I mean, unbelievable. What a legacy. Join us next time for more secret subterfuge with True Spies.

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I can't hear the, uh, pick, uh, encryption button off the truck.

So many of my turning points, whether it's about Hunter Gatherer, national security or ethics, hinge on, to some degree, 9-11. I mean, it is partially the attack, but it's also the reaction to it. The immediate aftermath, you saw so much debate about this issue. You know, how far do we go? What are we doing? How do we do it? What's going to be the long-term consequence and perception of doing it that way?

way. All of those things were in constant debate. I'm not saying that I agreed or anyone agreed with every decision that was made. I don't think that's possible. But look, we didn't have a blueprint. True Spies, The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.

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