Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

SETH, RONALD• 483

army and went back to Paris after the Liberation, leaving an RSS

expert to transmit on her behalf for a further five months.

After the war Sergueiev married an American officer and wrote

her memoirs,Secret Service Rendered, in which she gave a detailed

account of her duplicity. What she did not divulge was her connec-

tion with Soviet intelligence. One of her uncles was Nikolai V.

Skoblin, a seniorNKVDofficer, and the other was Evgenni Miller,

a White Russian general who was assassinated in Paris in 1937.

Much later,counterintelligenceinvestigators concluded that she had

probably operated for the NKVD throughout the period of her sup-

posed service for MI5 and the Germans.

SERIOUS AND ORGANISED CRIME AGENCY (SOCA).An-
nounced in February 2004, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency
absorbed theNational Criminal Intelligence Serviceand the Na-
tional Crime Squad to create an investigative body with an intelli-
gence function covering drug smuggling, people trafficking, money
laundering, and other organized crime. SOCA’s first director wasSir
Stephen Lander, the retireddirector-general of the Security Ser-
vice.

SERPELL, MICHAEL.A careerMI5officer and expert on Soviet
espionage, in 1947 Michael Serpell undertook a detailed study of
captured German files and documented the Gestapo’s investigation
of therote kapellenetwork during World War II. The result, cir-
culated under the joint authorship ofRobert Hemblys-Scales, dem-
onstrated the existence of aGRUnetwork in England before and
during the war and identified some of the spies run by the concert
pianistErnest Weiss.

SETH, RONALD.A Cambridge graduate who worked as a lecturer
before the war in the University of Tallinn, Ronald Seth was re-
garded—wrongly, in his view—as an expert on Eastern Europe. Ac-
cordingly, in 1941 he was transferred from the Royal Air Force to
Special Operations Executive(SOE) and trained in parachute and
sabotage techniques. He was dropped on a mission into Estonia in
October 1942, but was captured within hours of his landing and sen-
tenced to death as a spy. His subsequent adventures, while in German
custody, are described in his war memoirsA Spy Has No Friends,