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Template:Reference, "Like Hidden Fire" by Peter Hopkirk 1994

Captain Reginald Teague-Jones was a political and intelligence officer in the British Army. He was active in the Caucasus during the Russian Civil War. His orgins are somewhat obscure. Reginald was born in Britian in 1890 and died November 22, 1988 at the age of 99. His father, a language teacher appears to have died when Teague-Jones was 13-years old. His mother, who had two other younger children to bring up, now found herself in straitened circumstances and kindly friends in St. Petersburg, Russia offered to take young Reginald off her hands and see to his education. Reginald had a gift for languages and was sent to a German-run school in the Tsarist capital which specialized in languages. He rapidly acquired fluency in German, Russian and French and first hand experience of revolutionary politics at the age of 15.

On returning home to Britian, he spent a further two years at London University. Afterwards he proceeded to India in 1910. There at the age of 21, he joined the Indian Police, where he soon found himself engaged in frontier intelligence work, and added Persian and other Asiatic languages to his linguistic skills. Soon he was transfered to the Foreign and Political Department of the British Indian government, an elite body which had in the past schooled many of the most celebrated players in the Great Game, which took place roughly from 1830 to 1880 and primarily between Britain and Russia in what is roughly known today as Central Asia. It was during his employment in the Foreign and Political Department of the British Indian government when the Russian Revolution in November 1917 and the subsequent Russian Civil War occurred. Again he was transferred to make the best use of his skills in political and military intelligence in the Persian Gulf.

The First World War had, as any war, many crisis episodes. As the Azerbaijan, Baku crisis deepened, with the consequential threat to British India, Reginald was seen as the ideal individual to send there to find out the current political and military status of the city, as it was well known that the long expected Turkish offensive was about to occur to capture Baku. It is during this phase of Reginald's career, where he became embroiled after the fact by the Soviet authorities, of allegedly having a hand in the shooting of the 26 Baku Commissars. The 26 Baku Commissars were considered martyrs and held up as Marxist heros. As a result, it is known that the Soviet authorities had a vendetta against Teague-Jones. Diplomatic overtures between London and Moscow in the 1922 timeframe failed at removing Teague-Jones from this status and allowing him to revert to a normal life. For good reason Reginald went into hiding.

At the end of 1922 there is no further trace of Teague-Jones in the British Foreign Office files. However, soon after this Reginald Teague-Jones changed his name to Ronald Sinclair and later was promoted to the rank of major working in London, likely out of M.I.5's London headquarters for the Delhi Intelligence Bureau, as the Indian government's secret service was then called. Note that this is based on current yet circumstantial evidence.

Reginald made many trips to the Middle and far East at this point in his career. One such trip was made in 1926 in a Model A Ford across Persia, now Iran, ostensibly to investigate on behalf of British companies opportunities for trade.

Little is known of Reginald's movements during the Second World War. In 1941, at the age of 52, Teague-Jones was posted to the British consulate-general in New York, United States officially as a vice-consul, but in fact as an intelligence officer. After the war, his long career over in intelligence finally at an end, Teagure-Jones/Ronald Sinclair and his second wife - for he and his first wife Valya had long been divorced, retired to Florida, United States and then later moved to Spain. But his wife's failing health forced them to return to Britian where shortly afterwards she died.

In approximately 1989 Teague-Jones wartime journal was published under the title, "The Spy Who Disappeared: Diary of a Secret Mission to Russian Central Asia in 1918".

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