Reginald Victor Jones (29 September 1911 – 17 December 1997) 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.
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.
He was briefly based at Bletchley Park in September 1939, but returned to London (Broadway) in November,[2] leaving behind a small specialized team in Hut 3, who reported any decrypts of scientific or technological nature to "ADI Science".
[3] F. W. Winterbotham passed Jones 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.
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.
[6] As early as 1937, Jones had suggested that a piece of metal foil falling through the air might create radar echoes.
Jones also served as 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.
During his time at Aberdeen, much of his attention was devoted to improving the sensitivity of scientific instruments such as seismometers, capacitance micrometers, microbarographs and optical levers.
[13] 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.