Renegade hero : the true story of RAF pilot Terry Peet and his clandestine mercy flying with the CIA

Cold war helicopter ace Terry Peet lived for flying. He was a 'go anywhere, do anything,' Royal Air Force pilot with a reputation for 'sheer guts'. Whether ferrying troops to remote jungle landing zones or snatching casualties from makeshift clearings surrounded by two-hundred-feet high trees, he willingly pushed himself and his primitive Sycamore helicopter to the limit. During two years in the hot spots of Malaya and Borneo with the RAF, he repeatedly cheated death and earned a Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. Then suddenly he disappeared without trace, apparently drowned tragically while on a recreational scuba dive off the North Wales coast. Six years later he dramatically reappeared in a back-from-the-dead drama worthy of fiction. The media hailed him enthusiastically as a renegade hero and 'Flying Pimpernel' when the story of his mysterious disappearance and subsequent extraordinary double life unfolded. In fact he had been recruited by the CIA for a clandestine air force involved in paramilitary operations in the former Belgian Congo. He was told that his departure from the RAF had to be 'covert'. The summary presented in his eventual court martial crucially omitted this. It also failed to disclose that his employment as a mercenary, or 'contract pilot' to use the CIA's more inoffensive terminology, received the tacit approval of British intelligence. Moreover, a claim that the RAF had not seen or heard anything of him following his disappearance in Anglesey was completely untrue. This book is the true revelation of an entirely mysterious affair as told to the author by Terry Peet. "Cold war helicopter ace Terry Peet lived for flying. He was a 'go anywhere, do anything, ' Royal Air Force pilot with a reputation for 'sheer guts'. Whether ferrying troops to remote jungle landing zones or snatching casualties from makeshift clearings surrounded by two-hundred-feet high trees, he willingly pushed himself and his primitive Sycamore helicopter to the limit. During two years in the hot spots of Malaya and Borneo with the RAF, he repeatedly cheated death and earned a Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. Then suddenly he disappeared without trace, apparently drowned tragically while on a recreational scuba dive off the North Wales coast. Six years later he dramatically reappeared in a back-from-the-dead drama worthy of fiction. The media hailed him enthusiastically as a renegade hero and 'Flying Pimpernel' when the story of his mysterious disappearance and subsequent extraordinary double life unfolded. In fact he had been recruited by the CIA for a clandestine air force involved in paramilitary operations in the former Belgian Congo. He was told that his departure from the RAF had to be 'covert'. The summary presented in his eventual court martial crucially omitted this. It also failed to disclose that his employment as a mercenary, or 'contract pilot' to use the CIA's more inoffensive terminology, received the tacit approval of British intelligence. Moreover, a claim that the RAF had not seen or heard anything of him following his disappearance in Anglesey was completely untrue. This book is the true revelation of an entirely mysterious affair as told to the author by Terry Peet"--Bookl jacket A Royal Air Force helicopter pilot fakes his own death to join a CIA paramilitary unit in this remarkable Cold War biography. RAF helicopter ace Terry Peet had a well-earned reputation for sheer guts. While in Malaya and Borneo, he cheated death time and again, earning a Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. But Peet suddenly disappeared without trace—supposedly having drowned while scuba diving. Then, six years later, Peet reappeared. The media hailed him as a renegade hero when the story of his extraordinary double life was revealed. Peet had in fact been recruited by the CIA for clandestine paramilitary operations in the former Belgian Congo. He was then sent to Nigeria, where he led a UNICEF mission saving refugees from the Biafran War. Peet's work with the CIA had the tacit approval of British Intelligence, but his departure from the RAF had to be covert. Yet none of this was mentioned in the summary presented at his court martial. Now Renegade Hero recounts the full story of the mysterious affair as told to the author by Peet himself.