Christopher Burney Christopher Arthur Geoffrey Burney MBE ( 1917 – 1980 ) was an upper - class Englishman who served in the Special Operations Executive ( SOE ) during World War II . Biography . In 1941 , Pierre de Vomécourt organized AUTOGYRO , one of the first resistance networks of Section F of the Special Operations Executive . Among de Vomécourt ' s recruits were Georges Bégué , the first SOE agent ever to be parachuted into France , who was assigned as the wireless operator ; Noel Fernand Raoul Burdeyron ( real name : Norman F . Burley ) ; and Mathilde Carre . Lack of money , weapons and personnel , along with spotty communications with London meant that AUTOGYRO accomplished little . In frustration , Burdeyron / Burley singlehandedly derailed a German supply train by pulling up a rail , AUTOGYRO ' s only successful attack , causing considerable German casualties . Impressed , SOE decided to sent Burdeyron some assistance . They recruited Christopher Burney , a lieutenant in the British Army and a trained commando , who had lived in France and spoke idiomatic French without an accent . On 30 May 1942 , under the code name " Charles " , he was inserted by parachute into France along with William Grover - Williams , on a different mission under the code name " Sebastian " . After being blind - dropped into the French countryside , Burney made his way to his rendezvous with Burdeyron . Circling the building , he spotted several suspicious men watching from various positions . He immediately concluded that his rendezvous had been blown and AUTOGYRO betrayed ( it had — Mathilde Carre was in fact , a double agent ) . He quietly left , and never attempted any further contact with Burdeyron or de Vomécourt . Burney then tried to create his own network , but after eleven weeks learned that the Abwehr was passing around a circular warning bank clerks , hotel clerks and others to be on the lookout for a man named " Charles " who was asking strange questions , and offering a reward for tips on his whereabouts . The circular contained a good description of Burney who , tall and blonde , was very conspicuous in Normandy , where the average Frenchman was short and dark . Deciding he had done all he could , he planned his escape over the Pyrenees to Spain and back to England . Grover - Williams offered his help , and Burney met with him several times to organize the escape , but on the morning he was to meet Grover - Williams for the last time , Burney was surprised in his sleep by Abwehr agents who had been tipped off by a hotel clerk familiar with the circular . The Germans locked him up , firstly in Fresnes prison , for 15 months of solitary confinement , then in Buchenwald concentration camp . While at Buchenwald , Burney would meet F . F . E . Yeo - Thomas and also subsequently meet Phil Lamason , the senior officer in charge of 168 allied airmen and would help - at great risk - with their transfer to a POW camp . Freed in 1945 , he worked after the war for the newly formed United Nations , helping to commission their building in New York City . When Dutch diplomat and UN Assistant Secretary - General Adrian Pelt was posted from 1949 - 1951 in the Franco - British UN Trust Territory of Libya as UN Commissioner for Libyan Independence , Burney was assigned as his assistant . In the 1950s , banking magnate Siegmund Warburg recruited him as a manager for the British and French Bank . Burney ' s younger brother Roger Burney was one of two British officers killed on 18 February 1942 when the French submarine " Surcouf " Surcouf was mysteriously sunk in the Caribbean . In 1966 , Frank Kermode somewhat controversially included Burney ' s experience of time passing in " Solitary Confinement " in his own major critical work of Western experience of passing time in " The Sense of an Ending " .