Oswald Rayner
| Oswald Theodore Rayner | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
29 November 1888 Smethwick, Staffordshire, England |
| Died | 6 March 1961 (aged 72) Botley, Oxfordshire, England |
| Known for | |
Oswald Rayner (29 November 1888, in Smethwick, Staffordshire, England – 6 March 1961, in Botley, Oxfordshire, England) was a British MI6 agent in Russia during World War I. He later went on to be The Daily Telegraph correspondent in Finland.
Oswald Theodore Rayner was born in Smethwick, the son of Thomas Rayner, a draper in Soho Street and his wife Florence. Between the 1907 and 1910 Rayner studied modern languages at Oriel College, Oxford. During his time at Oxford, Rayner formed a close relationship with Felix Yusupov, who was also enrolled at the university. By the outbreak of the First World War, Rayner was highly proficient in French, German, and Russian, and so he was recruited by MI6 as an intelligence officer.
He is believed to have been involved in the final murder plot against Grigori Rasputin, and according to Andrew Cook he is supposed to have been the person who fired the shot that actually killed Rasputin.
British intelligence reports, sent between London and Petrograd in 1916, indicate that the British were not only extremely concerned about Rasputin's displacement of pro-British ministers in the Russian government but, even more importantly, his apparent insistence on withdrawing Russian troops from World War I. This withdrawal would have allowed the Germans to transfer their Eastern Front troops to the Western Front, leading to a massive outnumbering of the Allies and threatening their defeat. Whether this was actually Rasputin's intent or whether he was simply concerned about the huge number of Russian casualties (as the Empress's letters indicate) is in dispute, but it is clear that the British perceived him as a real threat to the war effort.
There were two officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Petrograd at the time. Witnesses stated that at the scene of the murder, the only man present with a Webley revolver was Lieutenant Oswald Rayner, a British officer attached to the SIS station in Petrograd, who had visited the Yusupov palace several times on the day of the murder. This account is further supported by an audience between the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, who knew about an assassination attempt before it happened, and the Emperor Nicholas II, when Nicholas stated that he suspected "a young Englishman who had been a college friend of prince Felix Yusupoff, of having been concerned in Rasputin's murder ...". Rayner knew Yusupov since they had met at University of Oxford. The second SIS officer in Petrograd at the time was Captain Stephen Alley, born in a Yusupov Palace near Moscow in 1876, where his father was one of the prince's tutors. Both families had very strong ties so it is difficult to come to any conclusion about whom to hold responsible.
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