How the Fifth Man stole secrets from Bletchley Park stuffed down his trousers
We think of the Cambridge spies as flamboyant and upper class. But ironmonger’s son John Cairncross was very different. Now a gripping biography reveals he was driven to betray his country by his hatred of British snobbery
He lacked the glamour of other spies... he was deemed boorish and arrogant
IT WAS a moment of sheer terror. For more than a decade, John Cairncross had been a loyal, discreet and entirely undetected s ervant of communist Moscow. Yet now, attempting to drive through Central London, he had stalled his car right in front of a policeman.
Inside the vehicle lay bundles of documents marked ‘Top Secret’ and destined for the eyes of the KGB. His Soviet handler was sitting i n the passenger seat beside him, terrified lest his Russian accent give him away.
The year was 1951, the height of the Cold War – and the policeman was approaching the car.
Panicking, Cairncross turned the ignition repeatedly, yet managed only to flood the engine.
And so it was with overwhelming relief that he heard the voice
of a well-meaning bobby dispensing advice on how to get the engine started once again – before sending Cairncross, one of the most prolific and treacherous spies in the history of British espionage, safely on his way.
It would be another 40 years before Cairncross was finally exposed. Even today his role as the ‘Fifth Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring that betrayed Britain’s secrets to the Soviet Union is rarely mentioned.
Certainly, he lacked the seedy glamour of his privileged, more notorious contemporaries Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby – flamboyant socialites with a taste for champagne and endless sexual conquests.
Cairncross, an ironmonger’s son from Scotland’s industrial heartland, had neither the upper-class background nor the accent. And his most significant secrets were obtained not in the upper reaches of Whitehall or favoured London salons, but in a cramped, underheated office called ‘ Hut 3’ at Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking centre.
Burgess and Maclean spent the Second World War on a glamorous posting to the British Embassy in Washington. Cairncross, meanwhile, was stuck in the Buckinghamshire countryside, poring over interminable dull ‘encryptions’ and ‘decryptions’ – coded and deciphered German documents – trying to make sense of any useful military intelligence that he could. Still more tedious was the task assigned to a colleague in Hut 3, a linguist from Cambridge ordered to determine ‘ the correct and precise word or phrase to use for every bit of German equipment from a Panzer Lastkraftwagen [a truck] to a nut or bolt’.
However compelling it might seem when portrayed in films such as The Imitation Game (based on the life of master mathematician Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch), much of life at Bletchley Park was mind-numbing drudgery.
Yet Cairncross used his position there to pass an astonishing amount of material to his Russian handlers, even if the method by which it was done sounds like something out of Dad’s Army.
Once processed, the decrypted documents were simply left strewn around the floor awaiting disposal, and Cairncross would stuff the papers down his trousers and walk out of the gates.
He was never stopped and checked. Then, with the documents in hand, Cairncross met his Russian handler in London, followed him to a quiet spot in the suburbs and handed over the package of information to the Soviet Union.
However junior he might have seemed in the chain of command, Cairncross had access to vast and hugely varied quantities of sensitive material. And, in one respect at least, he might have played the most significant role of all the Cambridge spies – helping his Russian paymasters turn the tide of the Second World War itself. JOHN Cairncross’s first impressions of the world were shaped by living through the worst years of the Depression. He was born in 1916 and raised in Lesmahagow, 20 miles south of Glasgow, in the grimy heartland of Scotland’s central coal-mining belt.
Cairncross was one of eight children, the son of a modestly successful ironmonger. His brother, Alec Cairncross, would later become a distinguished economist.
Although better off than most families, abject poverty and squalor were all around them. By 1932, during the depth of the economic slump, the number of people employed by the coal industry in central Scotland had fallen by more than 40,000.
The young John Cairncross began to see socialism and, later, communism as the answer.
He went to Glasgow University and then on to Cambridge in 1934, where he struggled to fit in with the confident public schoolboys, flirting with radical Left-wing ideas.
Cairncross was altogether more serious than his fellow students, and it was there that he found himself recruited to the ideology of the Soviet cause by the brilliant but enigmatic academic and Austrian Arnold Deutsch. That same year, Cairncross went on a cycling holiday to Germany – apparently alone – where he was further horrified by the rise of Hitler, the increased anti-Semitism and the militarism of the people.
Ever afterwards, Cairncross would cite his opposition to Nazism as the basis for his espionage activities for the Soviet Union, rather than devotion to communism itself.
At Cambridge he met Anthony Blunt, who had rooms above his own. Blunt, another member of t he Cambridge Five, would later forge a distinguished career as an art historian and rose to become Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, before his exposure as a former Soviet agent in 1979.
Although Blunt and Cairncross were politically aligned, they had little else in common. As Cairncross later put it, with audible prickliness, Blunt was ‘something of a patrician, very standoffish and not very accessible to undergraduates outside his immediate circles’.
After he graduated from Cambridge in 1936, Cairncross was recommend to Moscow as a potential agent by Burgess.
In a bizarre mix of communist jargon and English class snobbery, Burgess, the champagne communist, told Moscow that Cairncross was ‘lowermiddle-class… speaks with a strong Scottish accent and one cannot call him a gentleman’.
More damning still, he was ‘a petit bourgeois intoxicated with his own success’ and ‘never a member of the party in the real sense of the word, but I think we should work with him and involve him’. THE archives show that Cairncross’s Russian controller, a man called Yuri Modin, certainly believed that Cairncross betrayed Britain because of social snobbery, something he felt particularly keenly when, in 1937, he began to work at the Foreign Office, that most exclusive of civil service departments. The Scotsman would have been deemed ‘ boorish, illdressed, arrogant, and scornful of either diplomatic or social niceties’, Modin told his Soviet overseers.
‘To be perfectly frank,’ he continued, ‘I think his collaboration with the NKVD [ later the KGB] was
prompted by the boundless hatred their mockery provoked in him. John Cairncross had a sizeable chip on his shoulder, as the English would say.’
Spying for the Russians, in other words, was an act of revenge on a hierarchical society from which he felt he was unfairly excluded – although his complete lack of social skills hardly endeared him to his colleagues. He was described by one contemporary as clever, but also ‘an incoherent bore’.
Cairncross was certainly brainy, especially when it came to languages, and in 1942 he was sent to work at Bletchley Park, helping to translate intercepted German intelligence traffic.
The actual work was painstaking and dull. As Cairncross himself later described them, his duties i nvolved fill i ng i n missing or blurred words from the transcripts. But the communications themselves were of the highest grade, including Luftwaffe messages, and even communications between Adolf Hitler and his Supreme Command in Berlin and his commanders in the field – especially those fighting amid the carnage of the Eastern Front.
For the Soviet Union, which was losing an unimaginable 8,000 soldiers every single day of the war, such information must have been like gold dust.
In May 1943, Cairncross met his handler, who ‘ announced with a triumphant smile that the Russians had won a great air victory in which they had destroyed 600 aeroplanes’.
This referred to a series of air strikes launched by the Red Army Air Force between May 6 and 8, 1943, the lead up to the Battle of Kursk – a turning point in the course of the Second World War.
The battle was an attempt by the Germans to encircle and neutralise the Soviet forces at the Kursk salient: a bulge of Soviet-controlled territory 290 miles from Moscow jutting out into the German lines.
The Germans poured vast resources into the operation, codenamed Citadel, including more than 900,000 troops and 2,730 tanks.
Cairncross’s leaks gave the Russians vital information about German troop movements before the battle, as well as providing technical details about the Nazis’ mighty Tiger tank. Both sides suffered atrocious losses, but in the end, the battle was a bitter defeat for Hitler. Citadel proved to be the last major offensive that the German army was able to launch against the Soviet Union, and, for his efforts, Cairncross was secretly awarded the Order of the Red Banner the following year. CAIRNCROSS would later claim he stopped betraying his country once Hitler and the threat of fascism were defeated. In fact, he continued working for the Soviet Union throughout the post-war years.
According to evidence found in the Soviet Archives from Oleg Tsarev, a former KGB officer, Cairncross supplied his Russian handlers with information on British agents in Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula.
By the 1950s, Cairncross was employed by the Treasury and gave the Soviet Union details of how much Britain was spending on research into chemical and nuclear warfare, although there is no suggestion that he passed on anything more damaging – he had no access to any real atomic secrets.
Despite his long service, Cairncross’s popularity with Moscow was waning. For a start, the Russians weren’t much interested in what went on at the Treasury. Ever paranoid, they were sceptical, too, of how far they should trust British agents. Then there was Cairncross’s sheer incompetence, a level of disorganisation that led one contemporary to describe him as a hapless figure from an Ealing comedy.
He would often miss meetings, turn up late, or forget where he was supposed to be. The Russians gave him a camera, yet he couldn’t work it – a Soviet agent unable to take a decent photograph of a document to pass on to his handlers. They bought him a car, but he could barely drive it because he was unable to negotiate what he termed the
For the Soviets, his information on Hitler’s war machine was like gold dust
‘knobs and pedals’. He was, said one of his Russian bosses, ‘ the least mechanically minded man I have ever known’. CAIRNCROSS finally left the Civil Service in 1952, and eked out a living for the rest of his life as an obscure university lecturer and translator. It was only with the sensational exposure of the distinguished art historian Blunt in 1979 that Cairncross found his own record questioned. Amid t he furore – Blunt was not merely director of the Courtauld Institute, but Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures – a senior civil servant and former private secretary to Churchill called John Colville let it be known there had been another man in league with the Soviet Union at the same time as Blunt.
He wouldn’t disclose the name of the man in question, describing him as ‘one of the best brains in the Foreign Office’, but he was willing to provide clues.
A storm of speculation and enquiry then followed.
Colville told the investigative journalist Barrie Penrose that the Fifth Man had also worked at the Treasury and the Ministry of Supply. Trawling through the Civil Service records, Penrose worked out the probable truth and travelled to Italy, where Cairncross was then living, to confront him in person.
After a lifetime of deception, it was perhaps no surprise that Cairncross responded with lies. Then aged 66, he claimed he had been tricked into supplying information to Burgess in the late 1930s, unaware that his Cambridge friend had been a Soviet agent or even a communist.
The suspicions about Cairncross grew, however. Bob Cryer, the Labour backbencher, asked the Attorney General, Michael Havers QC (father of actor Nigel Havers), whether the Government planned to prosecute Cairn cross. The answer was: ‘ No. Even if there were admissible evidence, which there is not, extradition is not available from Italy in respect of offences of this nature.’
Meanwhile, the Scottish Labour MP Dennis Canavan asked Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher if Blunt and Cairncross continued to receive their Civil Service pensions or any other similar benefits from the state, to which the answer was again negative. Yet for all the work of Penrose and the press, the true extent of Cairncross’s treachery remained shielded from the public – a sharp contrast to the treatment of Blunt, who was stripped of his knighthood and honorary fellowship at Trinity College, and lost his position at the prestigious British Academy. Blunt died just a few years later in 1983, his reputation in tatters and his contributions to scholarship vastly overshadowed by his betrayal. CAIRNCROSS survived this flurry of interest and continued living much as before. In 1984, by now in his 70s, he met a young opera singer in her late 20s called Gayle Brinkerhoff. Later, they moved to an agreeable villa in the village of St-Antonin-du-Var in Provence.
Cairncross’s identity as the Fifth Man was finally confirmed in 1990 with the explosive book KGB: The Inside Story, jointly written by the British academic Christopher Andrew and KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky. The following year, Cairncross himself confirmed to The Mail on Sunday he was indeed ‘one of The Five during the War. I hope that this will finally put an end to the Fifth Man mystery.’ (Although he denied it once again in a posthumously published autobiography.)
When Cairncross and his wife finally returned to Britain in 1995, there was still no appetite to prosecute and, following a stroke, he died in October of that year.
Cairncross may not have directly caused the deaths of any brave and loyal British agents in the field, as Kim Philby most certainly did.
He may have played a key role in helping the Soviet Union turn back Hitler’s forces in 1943 at the Battle of Kursk. But he also illegally passed on the secrets of his country to a foreign power, including – at the height of the Cold War – figures relating to British spending on atomic weapons research.
It was a betrayal that drove him into exile, and ruined his ambition to forge a stable long-term career as a professional academic.
But as to why the British authorities refused to call him to account, we shall probably never know.
The Last Cambridge Spy, by Chris Smith, is published by The History Press on May 13, priced £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount, with free p&p) until May 5. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. Spend £30 on books and get FREE premium delivery.