Ronald Thomas Reed (8 October 1916 – 22 January 1995) was a BBC radio engineer who became an MI5 officer in 1940, and ran double agents during World War II. Background Reed was born in St Pancras, London. His father had been Second Head Waiter at the London Trocadero Restaurant before the First World War but was killed by a stray shell shortly after his arrival in France in 1917 when his son was less than a year old. Reed grew up with his mother Theresa at 9 Leigh Street in the Kings Cross area of London, and was a choirboy at St Pancras Church, close to St Pancras Station. Early on he was interested in radio, and built himself an early form of citizen's band radio. He attended Thanet Street Junior School in St Pancras, and from there gained a scholarship to the Regent Street Polytechnic, where he qualified as an electronic engineer. At around that time he also built himself an early form of TV, called a Baird Televisor. In 1938, he was taken on as a peripatetic engineer for the BBC, and helped on many outside broadcasts. The Second World War In 1940, Ronnie Reed was requested by the BBC to go on an assignment, which turned out to be a visit to Wormwood Scrubs prison, which is where MI5 had its headquarters at the beginning of the Second World War. He was taken to a cell in which there was a German spy who had just landed. This was Agent Summer, a Swedish citizen whose real name was Gösta Caroli. His interrogators wanted Reed to help supervise this agent's first broadcast back to Germany, in which he would tell them he had landed safely. Reed then supervised other double agents, such as Agent Snow (real name Arthur Owens), Agent Celery (real name Walter Dicketts), Agent Tate (real name Wulf Schmidt), during the rest of the War. He was permanently seconded to MI5, which deals with countering subversion. He was Case Officer for a number of agents, of whom the most important was Agent Zigzag (real name Eddie Chapman), whom he supervised from December 1942 until August 1944. , Reed was also involved when the stratagem of "The Man Who Never Was" was being prepared in 1943. Commander Ewen Montagu, who thought up the scheme, needed to produce an identity card for the corpse on which fake