John Cairncross

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John Cairncross : biography

25 July 1913 – 08 October 1995

During his time at Bletchley Park, he passed documents through secret channels to the Soviet Union.Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbatchev, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990, note 5, p. 247. While at Bletchley Park, he supplied the Soviets with advance intelligence from ULTRA about Operation Citadel. This led to the Battle of Kursk, the world’s largest tank battle, which set the seal on ultimate defeat for the Wehrmacht in the East. Full details of both the northern and southern attack routes to cut off the Kursk salient were provided in meticulous detail. The information Cairncross supplied enabled the Red Army to build several lines of defence with camouflaged anti-tank guns, exacting terrible carnage on the attacking armoured formations (panzers). It had proved a real challenge for British Intelligence to get this war-winning information into Stalin’s hands without revealing the secret of ULTRA. This essentially settled the war against Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front.

Cairncross in fiction

Cairncross appears as a character in the Franco-Belgian comic India Dreams by Maryse Charles and Jean-François Charles. He was also depicted in part three of the 2003 BBC TV series Cambridge Spies, where he appears reluctant to continue passing Bletchley Park data to the Russians for fear that the Red Army was heavily penetrated by German intelligence and by Eastern Front military intelligence under General Gehlen; Anthony Blunt is depicted in the drama as pressuring him with threats to continue. He is revealed to be the fifth of the Cambridge Five in Frederick Forsyth’s The Deceiver.

As a spy

Cairncross admitted to spying in 1951 after MI5 found papers in Guy Burgess’s flat with a handwritten note from him, after Burgess’s flight to Moscow. Some believe that he may have supplied information about the Western atomic weapons programme, the Manhattan Project, to assist the Soviet nuclear programme.Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, London, Penguin Books, 2000. note 13, p. 150 It would have been surprising, though, if he had clearance to any useful engineering information, or that he would have understood it. He was never prosecuted, however, which later led to charges that the government engaged in a conspiracy to cover up his role. Indeed, the identity of the infamous ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge Five remained a mystery outside intelligence circles until 1990, when KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky confirmed Cairncross publicly.Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbatchev, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, note 5, pp. 210 and 253. Cairncross actually worked independently of the other Four and did not share their upper-middle-class backgrounds or tastes. Although he knew Anthony Blunt at Cambridge and Guy Burgess in the Foreign Office (and had a personal dislike of both of them), he claimed not to have been aware that they or any of the others were also passing secrets to the Russians.

Between 1941 and 1945, Cairncross supplied the Soviets with 5,832 documents, according to Russian archives. In 1944, Cairncross joined MI6, the foreign intelligence service. In Section V, the counter-intelligence section, Cairncross produced under the direction of Kim Philby an order of battle of the SS. Later Cairncross would suggest that he was unaware of Philby’s connections with the Russians.

Yuri Modin, the Russian MGB (later KGB) control in London claims that Cairncross gave him details of nuclear arms to be stationed with NATO in West Germany. He gives no date for this message. But Cairncross was at the Ministry of Supply in 1951 and NATO was established in April 1949. However, there was no such plan at this time and it was only much later that NATO obtained tactical nuclear weapons under US control in Germany. This appears to have been a disinformation exercise.S.J.Hamrick (W.T.Tyler) Deceiving the Deceivers) ; Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2004.