Ronald Wingate

Ronald Wingate

Sir Ronald Evelyn Leslie Wingate, 2nd Baronet, CB, CMG, CIE, OBE (30 September 1889 – 31 August 1978) was a British colonial administrator, soldier and author. Wingate was born in 1889 in Kensington, London, and educated at Bradfield College and Balliol College, Oxford before entering the Indian Civil Service. In the Civil Service, he served as an Assistant Commissioner in Punjab and the city magistrate of Delhi.

During the First World War, Wingate was given a special assignment with the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force as an assistant political officer. After the war, he served as British Consul in Muscat, Oman, and helped to negotiate the Treaty of Seeb. He then briefly served in Kashmir before returning to Oman. After his second tour in Oman, Wingate held a variety of positions in British India, including service as the Acting Secretary of the Foreign and Political Department of the Indian Government and Commissioner of Baluchistan.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Wingate served with the Ministry of Economic Warfare in Africa and Southeast Asia. Then, in 1942, he joined the London Controlling Section (LCS), an organization within the War Cabinet devoted to military deception. Wingate became the Deputy Controller of the LCS in 1943 and helped to form numerous deception plans including Plan Jael, later called Operation Bodyguard. At the conclusion of the war, he was chosen to write the official history of Allied deception operations during it.

After the war, Wingate served as the British delegate on the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold and as a director on the board of the Imperial Continental Gas Association. He also wrote three books: Wingate of the Sudan, a biography of his father, Reginald Wingate; Not in the Limelight, his own memoirs; and Lord Ismay, a biography of General Hastings Ismay. Wingate died on 31 August 1978 at the age of 88.