Renegade Hero: The True Story of RAF Pilot Terry Peet and his Clandestine Mercy Flying with the CIA

by Michael Hingston

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.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2011

About the author

Michael Hingston tells true stories about seemingly ordinary people forced by circumstances into undertaking extraordinary feats. His book, Into Enemy Arms, published by Grub Street in 2006, recalls a German teenage girl’s struggle against Nazism and how she helped to hide and save a group of Allied Prisoners of War and then accompany them on their dangerous flight out of Germany. One amongst them was his uncle, the man she was destined to fall in love with and marry.
In Renegade Hero, published by Pen & Sword in 2011, Michael recounts the six-year secret life and exploits of a Cold War RAF helicopter ace who faked his death by drowning in order to join a clandestine CIA air force in the former Belgian Congo and then go on to run a UN-sponsored mercy mission during the Nigerian civil war. Michael covered the pilot’s court martial for desertion when he was working as a journalist in the early seventies.
Michael is currently working on what he hopes will be his next book - a maritime story which vividly resurrects the long-forgotten heroism of a steamer captain whose bravery made him the toast of the nation.
A self-proclaimed ‘orphan of the Empire’, Michael was born in British East Africa and spent his childhood in the Kenyan highlands and then in the coastal town of Mombasa. After attending the naval college, HMS Conway, on Anglesey from the age of thirteen, he became an officer cadet in the Merchant Navy before leaving the sea to become a journalist and then public relations consultant. Seven years after founding his own public relations company in London, he took it public and then sold out in order to fulfil a lifelong dream to sail round the world. This he did on his forty-four-foot ketch with his wife, Julia – a circumnavigation of three years during which they had to contend with pirates off Colombia and in the Red Sea.
Since retiring, Michael has lived in the Caribbean and is now settled in south-west France.

Reviews

[steven souder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read !!!

For some the need to prove themselves is overwhelming. The need to succeed and excel is a way of life. Terry set the standard. His commitment and compassion to help the poor people of Africa even though he knew he'd eventually have to face judgement if commendable.
Happy he finally did his time and found peace. scs

[Mike Garitta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the main char. to be an egomaniac coward when came to his family.No matter what he managed to accomplish he aborted his wife and daughters.There is no room for people like him on our planet.