REED, RONALD• 439Before World War II Reed held an amateur radio license, known
in the trade as a radio ham. Upon the outbreak of war he, like many
of his kind, joined the Radio Security Service (RSS) on the recom-
mendation of the Radio Society of Great Britain. His task was to
monitor the airwaves for illicit enemy transmissions, but there came
a moment whenMI5found itself in possession of a growing number
of enemy agents, some of them equipped with transmitters.
Reed’s initiation into clandestine wireless took place in October
1940 when he was driven toCamp 020at Ham Common, Richmond,
and introduced to Wulf Schmidt, a Nazi agent who only three weeks
earlier had parachuted into Cambridgeshire. After dozens of hours of
intensive interrogation, Schmidt had agreed to switch sides and help
MI5 to dupe hisAbwehrcontrollers. Reed’s role was to keep a close
watch on everything Schmidt did and ensure he double-crossed only
the enemy and made absolutely no attempt to warn the receiving sta-
tion that he was operating under duress. At exactly midnight Schmidt
tapped out his recognition call sign, D-F-H, which was acknowl-
edged byHamburg. This exchange was to be the first of hundreds
of coded messages that passed between Schmidt and the Abwehr dur-
ing the course of the war. The final transmission took place in May
1945, just as Allied troops entered Hamburg, forcing the Abwehr op-
erators to evacuate their base.
At first Reed’s task was limited to monitoring Schmidt’s wireless
procedure, but when the spy went into the hospital for surgery to his
duodenal ulcer, another RSS operator,Russell Lee, was obliged to
take over the transmitter and impersonate Schmidt’s style. Lee’s per-
formance was judged perfect by Reed but to reduce the risk of detec-
tion, MI5 decided to allow Lee to continue the charade with Schmidt
standing close by to answer any awkward questions posed by his Ab-
wehr controllers.
As a result of the successful deception perpetrated by Reed and
Lee, both men were invited to stay in the Security Service after the
war. Reed worked in thecounterespionagebranch between 1951
and 1957, and in 1960 he was posted to New Zealand assecurity
liaison officer. When the time came for anofficial historyto be writ-
ten of MI5’s wartime achievements, Reed, who had retired in 1977,
was invited to contribute a monograph on the subject of clandestine
wireless. Written anonymously, ‘‘Technical Problems Affecting