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26-471: During World War II, British intelligence was able to glean details of new German technologies simply by considering their code names. For instance, when they heard of a new system known as Wotan , Reginald Victor Jones asked around and found that Wotan was a one-eyed god . Based on this, he guessed it was a radio navigation system using a single radio beam. This proved correct, and the Royal Air Force

52-675: A Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) but the head of the Civil Service Sir Horace Wilson threatened to resign as Jones was only a lowly Scientific Officer, and the CBE was a compromise. ) He was subsequently appointed CB in 1946; and Companion of Honour (CH) in the 1994 Queen's Birthday Honours . He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1965, and received an honorary DSc from

78-722: A V-2 rocket expert on the Cabinet Defence Committee (Operations) and headed a German long range weapons targeting deception under the Double-Cross System . In 1946 Jones was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen , which he held until his retirement in 1981. He did not want to stay in Intelligence under the proposed postwar reorganisation. During his time at Aberdeen, much of his attention

104-432: A book in 1989 entitled Reflections on Intelligence . In this book, he mused: "I for one would have little objection to any authority having any information it wished about my actions - or even my thoughts - provided that I could be sure that it would not misinterpret the information to come to false conclusions about me." Jones married Vera Cain in 1940; they had two daughters and a son. He died on 17 December 1997. He

130-476: A length appropriate to the radar's wavelength, and dropped in bundles from aircraft, which then appeared on enemy radar screens as "false bombers". This technology is now known as chaff and contrary to the popular belief, was also known to the Germans at the time. Both parties were reluctant to use it out of fear that their enemy would do the same. This delayed its deployment for almost two years. Jones also served as

156-583: A number of tough scientific and technical intelligence problems during World War II and is generally known today as the "father of S&T Intelligence". He was briefly based at Bletchley Park in September 1939, but returned to London (Broadway) in November, leaving behind a small specialized team in Hut 3 , who reported any decrypts of scientific or technological nature to "ADI Science". F. W. Winterbotham passed Jones

182-805: Is buried in Corgarff Cemetery, Strathdon , Aberdeenshire. His papers are held by Churchill College, Cambridge . Clarendon Laboratory The Clarendon Laboratory , located on Parks Road within the Science Area in Oxford , England (not to be confused with the Clarendon Building , also in Oxford), is part of the Department of Physics at Oxford University . It houses the atomic and laser physics , condensed matter physics , and biophysics groups within

208-596: Is now immediately in front of the Lindemann Building, completed in 2018 and designed by Hawkins\Brown , with a budget of approximately £40 million. The Clarendon is named after Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon , whose trustees paid £10,000 for the building of the original laboratory, completed in 1872, making it the oldest purpose-built physics laboratory in England. The building was designed by Robert Bellamy Clifton . The brothers Fritz and Heinz London developed

234-650: The Clarendon Laboratory , completed his DPhil in 1934. Subsequently, he took up a Skynner Senior Studentship in Astronomy at Balliol College , Oxford. In 1936 Jones took up the post at the Royal Aircraft Establishment , Farnborough , a part of the Air Ministry . Here he worked on the problems associated with defending Britain from an air attack, and later in support of the liberation of Europe from

260-596: The London equations when working there in 1935. In 2007, the laboratory was granted chemical landmark status. The award was bestowed due to the work carried out by Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley in 1914. The original building, substantially enlarged, is now part of the Oxford Earth Sciences Department. The Oxford Electric Bell apparatus (also known as the Clarendon Dry Pile), constructed in 1840,

286-578: The Oslo Report , received in 1939 from an anti-Nazi German scientist, and Jones decided that it was genuine and largely reliable, though the three service ministries regarded it as a "plant" and discarded their copies: "... in the few dull moments of the War, I used to look up the Oslo report to see what should be coming along next." Jones's first job was to study "new German weapons", real or potential. The first of these

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312-594: The British decided to assign a scientist to the Intelligence section of the Air Ministry. No scientist had previously worked for an intelligence service. Jones quickly rose to become Assistant Director of Intelligence (Science) there. During the course of the Second World War he was closely involved with the scientific assessment of enemy technology, and the development of offensive and counter-measures technology. He solved

338-541: The British were able to build jammers whose effect was to "bend" the Knickebein beams so that German bombers spent months scattering their bomb loads over the British countryside. Thus began the " Battle of the Beams " which lasted throughout much of World War II, with the Germans developing new radio navigation systems and the British developing countermeasures to them. Jones frequently had to battle against entrenched interests in

364-685: The Department, although four other Oxford Physics groups are not based in the Clarendon Lab. The Oxford Centre for Quantum Computation is also housed in the laboratory. The Clarendon Laboratory consists of two adjoining buildings, the Lindemann Building (named after Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell ) and the Grade II listed Townsend Building (named after Sir John Sealy Townsend ). The Beecroft Building (named after Adrian Beecroft )

390-448: The Nazis. More generally, he was fond of practical jokes and describes in his book Most Secret War how he used that skill to deceive the Germans during World War II. His extensive use of deception to deceive the Germans is consistent with the term disinformation , which is defined as deliberate planting of false information and physical evidence to lead an opponent astray. In September 1939,

416-655: The Orange Reaper electronic support measures system and the Blue Vixen radar—the latter most likely so named because it was a replacement for the Blue Fox radar. Several British military-related terms have a similar "colour" format to Rainbow Codes, but are not true examples since they do not refer to classified research projects and/or were adopted long after Rainbow Codes went out of use. Others are entirely unofficial (sometimes humorous) nicknames. These include: An allusion to

442-653: The Rainbow codes was made in the title of the 1961 Alistair MacLean Cold War novel The Dark Crusader , even more so in the American edition's title The Black Shrike . Both names were based on Blue Streak (which was mentioned in the novel); the title was of a fictional solid-fueled ICBM which was the object of a covert theft operation at an isolated Fijian test site. Reginald Victor Jones Reginald Victor Jones CH , CB , CBE , FRS , FRSE , LLD (29 September 1911 – 17 December 1997)

468-670: The Second World War that I have ever read" and, more generally, it has acquired almost classic status. In 1981, Jones became a founding member of the World Cultural Council . The same year he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on From Magna Carta to Microchip . In 1993 he was the first recipient of the R. V. Jones Intelligence Award , which the CIA created in his honour. Jones published

494-578: The University of Aberdeen in 1996. In 1969 he delivered the Wilkins Lecture . Jones was principal interviewee of the BBC One TV documentary series " The Secret War " , first aired on 5 January 1977 and narrated by William Woollard . His 1978 published autobiography Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 was described by historian A. J. P. Taylor as "the most fascinating book on

520-567: The armed forces, but, in addition to enjoying Churchill's confidence, had strong support from, among others, Churchill's scientific advisor F. A. Lindemann and the Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal . As early as 1937, Jones had suggested that a piece of metal foil falling through the air might create radar echoes. He, together with Joan Curran , was later instrumental in the deployment of " Window ": strips of metal foil, cut to

546-596: The end of the Ministry in 1959. Its functions were split between the War Office , the Air Ministry , and the newly created Ministry of Aviation , which was responsible for civil aviation. After the reorganization, projects were mostly named with randomly selected codes comprising two letters and three digits, e.g. BL755 , WE.177 . Rainbow codes, or at least names that look like them without being official, have occasionally been used for some modern systems; current examples include

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572-524: The project they designated. For example, "Black Maria" is also a nickname for a police van and the "Red Duster" is a nickname for the Red Ensign , the flag flown by British merchant ships . Some code names were not assigned through the official system, but created to sound like it. The Blue Yeoman radar is an example, an unofficial name created by combining the names of two other projects, Blue Riband and Orange Yeoman . The names were mostly dropped with

598-653: Was a British physicist and scientific military intelligence expert who played an important role in the defence of Britain in World War II by solving scientific and technical problems, and by the extensive use of deception throughout the war to confuse the Germans. Reginald Jones was born in Herne Hill , South London, on 29 September 1911. He was educated at Alleyn's School , Dulwich , and Wadham College , Oxford , where he studied Natural Sciences. In 1932 he graduated with First Class honours in physics and then, working in

624-511: Was a radio navigation system which the Germans called Knickebein . This, as Jones soon determined, was a development of the Lorenz blind landing system and enabled an aircraft to fly along a chosen heading with useful accuracy. At Jones's urging, Winston Churchill ordered up an RAF search aircraft on the night of 21 June 1940, and the aircraft found the Knickebein radio signals in the frequency range which Jones had predicted. With this knowledge,

650-586: Was able to quickly render it useless through jamming. Wishing to avoid making this sort of mistake, the Ministry of Supply (MoS) initiated a system that would be entirely random and deliberately unrelated to the program in any way, while still being easy to remember. Each rainbow code name was constructed from a randomly selected colour, plus an (often appropriate) noun taken from a list, for example: While most colour and noun combinations were meaningless, some combinations produced real names, although quite unrelated to

676-564: Was devoted to improving the sensitivity of scientific instruments such as seismometers , capacitance micrometers, microbarographs and optical levers. His book Instruments and Experiences details much of his later work in some depth and can act as a reference work on fine mechanism design. Jones was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1942, for the planning of a raid on Bruneval to capture German radar equipment (Churchill had proposed that Jones should be appointed

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