Hector Boyes recognized the value of the Oslo Report

Hector Boyes had commanded the gunboat HMS Thistle in the German East African Campaign, earning seven mentions in dispatches and several decorations. After retiring as a rear admiral in 1934, he returned under a temporary captain's appointment as naval attaché in Oslo. There he acted on the coded instructions in an anonymous letter and received the material later known as the Oslo Report. He recognized its importance and sent it into both MI6 and naval intelligence channels, together with a vacuum-tube sensor connected with proximity fuzes. Later attaché work in Tokyo produced information about Japanese battleships and carrier groups. The account then places him in Latin America, where suggestions that he disrupted pro-German movements remain explicitly unproved.