From an article written by Lucy Moore for Mailonline and Niamh Walsh
For the first time, Maeve de Burgh has given an extensive interview – and the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal her full incredible story, from her days in Malta training British spies to fight the communist regime in Albania… And this was serious espionage, with many dying for what they believed.
She married Colonel Charles Davison. The couple moved to Argentina, where Davison had grown up, and their two sons, Christopher and Richard, were born there. But problems at work urged them to return to Europe. And once in Europe, the job situation was no better. ‘Getting a job was a problem until the army offered him – well, us, really – a post in Malta,’ They moved to Malta in 1951. Maeve said. ‘I thought this was rather exciting’. Maeve and her husband were being trained to train spies. They were part of ‘Operation Valuable’, one of the earliest Cold War attempts to overthrow the communist regime in Albania by training undercover insurgents.
Davison was given the official title ‘Pioneer Training and Disposal Unit’, although the post was actually intelligence work, centred on training young Albanian volunteers who were intent on freeing their country from the grip of communism. Davison taught the men how to handle guns and explosives, as well as how to survive on the run and other skills.
‘The young men were being trained in Malta to operate behind communist lines in Albania and make life difficult for the communist authorities,’ Maeve said. ‘I did a lot of secretarial work. My husband trained the young recruits in explosives in an isolated fort.’ What they were not told before arriving in Malta, however, was that the previous group of recruits sent to Albania had been discovered – picked up by Albanian authorities and executed. The security leak was blamed on the training personnel in Malta, which was why the new group – including the Davisons – had been enlisted. The isolated fort at which they worked was in the mountains, and the couple would travel from their home daily to the location – taking care to keep the true nature of their work secret.
It became difficult for them to make friends in Malta, as they couldn’t answer questions about their jobs, and they worked at maintaining a distance from their neighbours to avoid accidentally revealing any information. One person with whom they did socialise, however, was Lord Louis Mountbatten – who was at the time Supreme Commander of the Nato fleet, based in Malta. Mountbatten – an uncle of Queen Elizabeth’s husband Prince Philip of Greece and the last viceroy of India – took a keen interest in their mission and often invited them to dinners.
The Davisons mission ultimately ended in tragedy. Devastatingly, the agents they trained met the same fate as the previous recruits: they were discovered by the Albanian authorities and executed. ‘On the night the trainees landed in Albania, we spent all night at the fort, listening for the coded message to say they landed safely,’ Maeve said. ‘We whooped with joy when we heard they had landed safely, but the next morning we learned all bar one had been arrested and executed. Just one made it back by crossing a mountain range, suffering from frostbite.
‘The appalling loss of life couldn’t continue, so the operation was disbanded – though nobody was able to pinpoint how the Albanians were getting their information.’ It was a mystery that was only solved years later, in the extraordinary and shocking discovery of the infamous Cambridge Five – a circle of British men with impeccable society connections who fell under the spell of communism during their university days at Cambridge University and later became Soviet spies.
The saga of the Cambridge Five meant little to Maeve and her husband when British intelligence officers Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to Moscow in a blaze of publicity in the mid-1950s. But that changed in 1963, when Kim Philby, a veteran member of British Intelligence, confessed to being a double-agent and defected to Russia. The name rang a bell with Maeve: she had known Philby as an intelligence boss during their days in the Mediterranean, a period when their mission fell under his remit. When he was revealed as a spy, the Davisons realised that it was very likely Philby who had been passing on the information about their Albanian trainees to his communist bosses. Maeve was enraged, thinking of all of the idealistic young men who died because of the betrayal. ‘I was very angry,’ she said. ‘It was such a waste of young life.’
After the Albanian training operation was disbanded, the Davisons left Malta and returned to England.
Showing an early and natural flair for music, the Davisons’ son Chris would often entertain guests with songs on the piano. As he got older, Chris forged a more and more successful music career, taking Maeve’s maiden name, de Burgh, as his stage name. It wasn’t long before Chris de Burgh became very well known. His daughter Rosanna won the title of Miss World in 2003 and enjoyed a successful career as a model.
Tweeting from a five-star hotel in Mauritius, where she was spending the annual family holiday in 2011, Rosanna wrote: ‘She (her grandmother Maeve) was once a spy in WW2 where she trained Albanians to overthrow their communist regime!’
© Argumentum
