Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

RIEUL, ROLAND• 457

Russia’s allies from knowing very important work of a defense na-

ture.

At our first meeting he began explaining something to me with much en-

thusiasm, but I had only the slightest idea about the structure of the nu-

cleus.... He not only gave me technical data, but explained the sense of

it, so that I could comprehend what we were discussing. I prepared my

own glossary that proved to be extremely useful. All the terms were new

ones that no one had ever heard of before. And these people did not cost

the treasury one pound. They were our kind of people, brave people with

initiative who considered that giving aid to the Soviets was a moral and

political duty. Understandably this pertains, I hope, not only to atomic sci-

entists.

Documents in theKGB archivesdisclosed in 2003 suggest that Ri-

deal, who was knighted in 1951, may have been attributed the NKVD

code namealkitin 1943. Although the word appears to have no

meaning, there was a wartime military tailor of that name in England

during World War II with branches in London and Cambridge.

RIEUL, ROLAND.A sergeant in the French army, Roland Rieul was
captured by the Germans in 1940 and spent three years in captivity,
including six months at the Henschel aircraft factory at Schoenfeld.
After two unsuccessful escape attempts, Rieul broke out of Stalag
IIIB at Furstenburg-on-A ́der in May 1943 and made his way by train
to the village of Besbach, where he had a contact in the local school.
Having found his teacher and been given shelter, he was escorted to
the railway marshaling yards nearby and instructed to climb on a
train for Italy. He hid in one of the goods compartments and soon
was in Basel, Switzerland. There he reported to the British consulate
and was given a warm welcome by the consul, Tim Frenken, to whom
he supplied a detailed description of the German aircraft factory
where he had worked.
Frenken also happened to be the localSecret Intelligence Service
(SIS) head of station, and once Colonel H. A. Cartwright, the British
military attache ́at the embassy in Bern, confirmed his credentials—
that his father was French and his mother British, and that his English
wife and two children were in England—Rieul was sent to Porentruy
to recover from the rigors of captivity. In mid-July 1943 he was taken