MI5’s investigation of Ronald Sydney Seth, SOE’s Agent Blunderhead and the SD’s Agent 22D: Loyal British agent or Nazi double agent?

Abstract

This article charts the colourful wartime career of Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Ronald Sydney Seth and presents for the first time the subsequent investigation into his wartime conduct by MI5. Seth, as Agent Blunderhead, was parachuted into German-occupied Estonia late in 1942 to destroy the country’s vital shale oil plants. Upon landing, Seth was swiftly captured and offered to work for the Germans as a double agent. In April 1945, Seth was sent over the German border into Switzerland as SD Agent 22D, where he promptly presented the British with sensational peace terms from Himmler. This article presents the British security services’ remarkable conclusions and indicates that, in their opinion, Seth was ‘spiritually so much under German domination that he intends to work for an Anglo-German understanding and an anti-Russian policy after the war’, had ‘not told us all about the services he rendered to the Germans’, was of ‘unbalanced character and rabidly anti-Soviet’, ‘extremely untruthful’, prone to ‘megalomania’ and that ‘neither his loyalty to this country nor his discretion were all that could be desired’. Seth was also considered to be a post-war security threat whose job opportunities should be restricted. Despite these revelations, Seth was never prosecuted and was able to become a successful post-war espionage author. This article explains how these seemingly obvious contradictions came to pass.