This series contains personnel files of SOE agents and staff. The files may contain papers dealing with the service records of individuals, including medical reports, appraisals of performance and suitability for particular roles, as well as passport-style photographs of the subject and reports of their activities. The contents in any individual's file can vary considerably however, and some files only contain a very brief note indicating that an individual was considered for service in SOE, but rejected.
Some papers on many of the files are damaged or mutilated to some extent: many have been partly burnt; some names have been removed by being cut out from papers at some time in the past. The files also include papers in many different languages, according to the work performed by the individual concerned. Some extracts continue to be retained by the Department under section 3(4) of the Public Records Act and there are dummy sheets in place to indicate where this has happened. Many files contain passport-style photographs of the agents.
Because of the sensitive nature of many of the papers on these files, they are closed during the lifetime of the individuals concerned or until they can be assumed to be deceased (i.e. their 100th birthday). Where no date of birth is known it is assumed that the youngest agents in the field in the last year of the war might have been born as late as 1930, and the 100 year closure date has been calculated from 1930.