John Cairncross

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John Cairncross
Born(1913-07-25)25 July 1913
Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, Scotland
Died8 October 1995(1995-10-08) (aged 82)
Herefordshire, England
Alma materUniversity of Glasgow
University of Paris
Trinity College, Cambridge
Spouses
  • Gabriella Oppenheim
  • Gayle Brinkerhoff
Espionage activity
AllegianceSoviet Union
Service branchForeign Office
The Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park
CodenameLiszt

John Cairncross (25 July 1913 – 8 October 1995) was a British civil servant who became an

Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five.[1]
He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.

The most significant aspect of his work was helping the Soviets defeat the Germans in battle during the

Second World War; he may also have told Moscow that the US was developing a nuclear bomb. Cairncross confessed in secret to MI5's Arthur S. Martin in 1964 and gave a limited confession to two journalists from The Sunday Times in December 1979.[2]
He was given immunity from prosecution.

According to The Washington Post, the suggestion that John Cairncross was the "fifth man" of the Cambridge ring was not confirmed until 1990, by Soviet double-agent Oleg Gordievsky. This was re-confirmed by former KGB agent Yuri Modin's book published in 1994, My Five Cambridge Friends Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross by Their KGB Controller.[3][4]

Childhood and education

Cairncross was born at Pine Cottage, Lesmahagow, in Lanarkshire, the youngest of four girls and four boys, of Elizabeth Andrew Wishart (1875–1958), a primary schoolteacher, and Alexander Kirkland Cairncross (1865–1947), an ironmongery manager.[5] His three brothers became professors, one of whom was the economist Sir Alexander Kirkland Cairncross (a.k.a. Alec Cairncross). The journalist Frances Cairncross is his niece. Cairncross grew up in Lesmahagow, a small town on the edge of moorland, near Lanark in the Central Belt of Scotland, and was educated at Lesmahagow Higher Grade School (where his name appears as the 1928 winner of the Dux prize); Hamilton Academy; the University of Glasgow; the Sorbonne; and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied French and German.[6][2][7]

Early professional work

After graduating, Cairncross took the British Civil Service exam and won first place in both the "home civil service" and the "foreign office and diplomatic service" competitions.[8] An article in the Glasgow Herald on 29 September 1936 noted that Cairncross had scored an "outstanding double success of being placed 1st in the Home List and 1st in the competition for the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service" and that he had been placed fifth in the University of Glasgow bursary competition of 1930 and was also a Scholar and Bell Exhibitioner at Trinity College, Cambridge.[9]

Cairncross worked initially in the

Foreign Office before transferring to the Treasury and then the Cabinet Office, where he worked as a private secretary to Lord Hankey, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It has been suggested[by whom?] that in 1936, whilst at Cambridge, Cairncross joined the Communist Party of Great Britain but he was not noted whilst at university for any political activity by his brother Alec, who was also at Cambridge until 1935. Sir Alec also recalled that John "was a prickly young man, who was difficult to argue with and resented things rather easily".[10]

It was while he was working with the Foreign Service (c. 1936) that he was recruited as a spy for the Soviets by James Klugmann of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[11]

Second World War

In 1942 and 1943 Cairncross worked at

GC&CS, Bletchley Park in Hut 3, on Ultra ciphers. He had access to communications of the German military and intelligence services.[11][2] In June 1943, he left Bletchley Park for a job in MI6.[12][2]

Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park

Cairncross passed decrypted documents through secret channels to the Soviet Union.[13] Codenamed Liszt by the Russians because of his love of music, Cairncross had been instructed to get into Bletchley Park, known to the KGB as Kurort.[14]

From 1942, the

Tunny.[15] Cairncross smuggled Tunny decrypts due to be destroyed out of Hut 3 in his trousers, transferring them to his bag at the railway station before going to meet his NKVD contact in London, Anatoli Gorsky.[14] The Soviets were particularly interested in traffic between Berlin–Pskov, Berlin–Helsinki, Berlin–Lisbon, Trebizond–Istanbul, Berlin–Bucharest, and Kirkenes–Oslo. They were also interested in British efforts to decipher Soviet ciphers and in the joint effort by German and Japanese cipher experts to decipher Soviet signals including military ones, which the combined German–Japanese effort failed to achieve with the Soviet diplomatic ciphers.[16]

The raw transcripts decrypted by Colossus were passed to intelligence officers at Bletchley Park, who created reports based on this material by disguising its origin as signals traffic. By providing verbatim transcripts, Cairncross showed the Soviets that the British were breaking German ciphers.

Stalin distrusted unsourced intelligence presented to him by Britain and the United States.[18]

Operation Citadel

Operation Citadel was the codename given by

Tunny decrypts (transcripts) gave the British advance intelligence about Operation Citadel. Almost all raw transcripts were destroyed at the end of the war but a surviving transcript dated 25 April 1943 from Army Group South signed by Maximilian von Weichs shows the high level of detail available to British intelligence officers. Analysts deduced the northern and southern attack routes, and a report based on this transcript was passed through official channels to Stalin.[15] During this period, Cairncross provided a second, clandestine channel, supplying raw Tunny transcripts directly.[15]

Tito and the Yugoslav partisans

Comintern and with the Soviet Union. Cairncross first in Hut 3, then later at MI6 HQ, had access to raw decrypts. Communications from Comintern to Tito supplying some of this intelligence, strongly suggest that he passed decrypts concerning Yugoslavia to the KGB.[19]

As a spy

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. Cairncross later suggested that he was unaware of Philby's connections with the Russians. In October 1944, he wrote to his Soviet leaders in foreign intelligence that "I am delighted that our friends found my help worthy of attention, and I am proud that I contributed something to the victory, which led to the almost complete cleansing of the Soviet land from the invaders".[16] In March 1945, he was awarded a £1,000 per year pension but he refused to accept it.[16][20]

Yuri Modin, the Russian MGB (later KGB) Controller 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.[2] Cairncross was at the Ministry of Supply in 1951 and NATO was established in April 1949. 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.[2] This appears to have been a disinformation exercise.[21]

In September 1951, he was questioned by British counterintelligence about his relationship with Maclean and the Communist Party.[16] Cairncross had been trained by the Soviets on how to behave during a counterintelligence interrogation.[16] On 23 October 1951, Cairncross informed his Soviet controller that he had merely explained to the interrogator that he did not hide his membership with the party and that he would merely greet Maclean when he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but did not maintain any contact with him after graduation.[16] For security, the residence temporarily stopped contact with him, allowed him to continue to report monthly his situation with appropriate signals, and planned a follow-up meeting on 23 January 1952.[16] The Soviets developed an exfiltration plan for Cairncross including funds, documents, and communication methods while living in other countries.[16] Cairncross did not signal his controller until an early March 1952 meeting during which Cairncross stated that he had been interrogated again.[16] The residency did not have any more contact with Cairncross and instructed Kim Philby to determine Cairncross's whereabouts.[16] Philby could not determine the whereabouts of Cairncross.[16]

Cairncross admitted to some impropriety in 1951 after MI5 found papers in Guy Burgess's flat with a handwritten note from him, after Burgess's flight to Moscow. This included a 15-page report about international affairs and policy obtained from nine officials. Cairncross claimed that this was the only document that he had ever provided to Burgess. No evidence of his spying for the Soviets during the war was produced.[20] The official report concluded that the interrogations in 1951 and 1952 had "failed to produce evidence on which a charge of espionage could be based".[22] Philby had also informed the residency of this.[16]

Evidence from the Soviet archives strongly indicate that Cairncross supplied to his Soviet handlers early information about British intentions to develop an

cover up
his role.

The identity of the infamous 'fifth man' in the Cambridge Five remained a mystery outside intelligence circles until 1990, when

defector Oleg Gordievsky confirmed Cairncross publicly.[25][26] Cairncross worked independently of the other four and did not share their upper-middle-class backgrounds or tastes. Although he knew Anthony Blunt at Cambridge, Guy Burgess socially (and had a dislike of both of them), Donald Maclean from the Foreign Office and Kim Philby from MI6, he claimed not to have been aware that they were also passing secrets to the Russians.[27]

Cairncross had resigned from the civil service in late 1952 and forfeited his pension.[22] In 1964, he admitted to interrogator Arthur Martin that he had spied for the Soviets.[11] In December 1979, Cairncross was approached by journalist Barrie Penrose and confessed to him. The news was widely publicized leading many to surmise that he was in fact the "fifth man", a designation which would be confirmed in 1989 by Gordievsky, who had defected to Britain.[2]

While Cairncross is now widely considered to be the "fifth man", a few sources previously believed that the designation should go to Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild. In his 1994 book The Fifth Man, Roland Perry asserted this claim. After the book was published, former KGB controller Yuri Modin denied ever having named Rothschild as "any kind of Soviet agent". Modin's own book's title clarifies the name of the fifth man: My Five Cambridge Friends: Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross.[28][29]

Cairncross did not view himself as one of the Cambridge Five, insisting that the information he sent to Moscow was not harmful to Britain and that he had remained loyal to his homeland.[30] He believed that he had been doing a favour to an ally who was being refused information by a "right wing clique", according to one news item.[2] His link to the Cambridge ring is tenuous, since his truly valuable spy work had concluded by the end of the war. A review of the 2019 book by Chris Smith, The Last Cambridge Spy: John Cairncross, Bletchley Park Codebreaker and Soviet Double Agent, proposes this view. The review adds that unlike the other four, described as "privileged" and as "haute bourgeois" by another book (A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean), he was "lower middle class" with a heavy Scottish accent.[31] "It was mere happenstance that he was at Cambridge with the others".[32][20]

Later life

At the end of the war, Cairncross joined the

Romance Languages at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.[33] Cairncross was an expert on French authors and translated the works of many 17th century French poets and dramatists such as Jean Racine, Jean de La Fontaine and Pierre Corneille, as well as writing three of his own books, Molière bourgeois et libertin, New Light on Molière and After Polygamy was Made a Sin.[34]

This career was ended following further investigation into Cairncross by MI5 investigative officer Arthur Martin. After Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, Martin reopened the files to hunt for the fourth and fifth men in 1964.[16] To Martin's surprise, Cairncross made a full confession. Martin also received a denunciation which led to Blunt's confession.[citation needed] Despite his confession to Martin, Cairncross was never prosecuted for his espionage activities.[35] The confession, conducted in Cleveland, Ohio, was not made under police caution and would therefore have been inadmissible in court. Despite MI5 enquiries regarding extradition, the FBI did not view Cairncross a danger to US security and had no grounds to deport him to Britain. MI5 asked Cairncross if he would be willing to voluntarily return to Britain to provide his confession again, this time under caution. He declined to do so.[36]

In 1967, Cairncross moved to

Foreign Office at the same time as Donald Maclean. After searching the Foreign Office lists, Penrose concluded that Cairncross was that spy and confronted him.[37]

Cairncross's third confession became front-page news. In 1981, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher informed parliament that Cairncross was a Soviet agent and was living with his wife in the west of England while he wrote his memoirs.[16] His status as the "fifth man" was established in 1990 by Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB defector. Cairncross retired to the south of France until 1995 when he returned to Britain and married American opera singer Gayle Brinkerhoff, daughter of John Brinkerhoff. This was one month after his first wife whom he married in 1951, Gabriella Oppenheim, died. Later that year he died after suffering a stroke, at the age of 82.[2] Unlike many other spies, Cairncross was never charged criminally for passing information to Moscow. His only imprisonment was in Rome, after being convicted of charges involving currency.[2]

Cairncross's autobiography, The Enigma Spy, was published in 1997. In 2001, writer Rupert Allason lost a court case in which he claimed to have ghostwritten The Enigma Spy in return for copyright and 50% of the book proceeds.[29] According to the BBC, "John Cairncross denied both that he was the supposed 'fifth man' and that such a person had ever existed. Critics at the time viewed this book as a last attempt to clear his name, though few appear to have been convinced".[38]

Cultural representations

Cairncross is depicted in part three of the 2003 BBC TV series

Franco-Belgian comic India Dreams by Maryse and Jean-François Charles. He is depicted as the fifth of the Cambridge Five in Frederick Forsyth's The Deceiver
.

Cairncross appears as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, played by Allen Leech. He is portrayed as an unwitting double agent being used as a back-channel by MI6 to pass information to the Soviets that Churchill is too cautious to provide; no historical basis for this is provided. Historians, and the spy's own autobiography, have confirmed that Cairncross was spying for the Soviets because of his own views, and that this was not discovered by MI6 until long after the end of WWII.[2]

Awards

Bibliography

Written

  • New Light on Molière: Tartuffe, Elomire Hypocondre (Librairie Droz, 1956)
  • Molière bourgeois et libertin (Nizet, 1963)
  • After Polygamy Was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy (Routledge, 1974)
  • Things to come: the world food crisis, the way out (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 1974).
  • An Approach to Food and Population Planning (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 1978)
  • Population and Agriculture in the Developing Countries (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 1980).
  • La Fontaine Fables, And Other Poems (Colin Smythe, 1982)
  • L'Humanité de Molière (Nizet, 1988)
  • The Enigma Spy: An Autobiography (Century, 1997)

Translated

  • Iphigenia; Phaedra; Athaliah (Racine, Penguin Classics, 1963)
  • Andromache; Britannicus; Berenice (Racine, Penguin Classics, 1967)
  • The Cid, Cinna, The Theatrical Illusion (Corneille, Penguin Classics, 1975)
  • Polyeuctus, The Liar, The Nicomedes (Corneille, Penguin Classics, 1980)
  • La Fontaine Fables and Other Poems (La Fontaine, Colin Smythe, 1982)

References

  1. ^ Barnes, Julian E. (27 January 2003). "Spy Stories: The Third Man". U.S. News & World Report: 46.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Bower, Tom (10 October 1995). "OBITUARIES: John Cairncross". The Independent.
  3. ^ "John Cairncross Dies". The Washington Post. 26 December 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  4. ^ "John Cairncross, Fifth Man in Spy Ring, Dead at 82". Chicago Tribune. 11 October 1991. Retrieved 30 December 2020.
  5. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/60449. Retrieved 11 July 2021. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  6. ^ "Plea over Scots Spy". Scottish News Archive, The Herald, Glasgow. 13 January 1998. Archived from the original on 7 November 2012. Retrieved 7 September 2011. (from full text) Until his death two years ago, Cairncross, a former pupil of Hamilton Academy and graduate of Glasgow University, attempted to minimise the extent of the secrets he passed to the Soviet Union.
  7. ^ "Newsnight - John Cairncross". BBC Archive. 31 October 1990.
  8. ^ "Civil Service posts – Open Competition results – Successful candidates". The Scotsman. 26 September 1936. p. 17.
  9. ^ Glasgow Herald, 29 September 1936.
  10. ISBN 0953541304
    .
  11. ^ a b c "John Cairncross Spy, Britain and France". Atomic Heritage and National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. 11 September 2011. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  12. ^ Grant, R. G. (1989). MI Five - MI Six. NY: Gallery Books. p. 105.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^
    ISBN 0 7522 2189 2
  15. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-957814-6
    .
  16. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Ермаков, Н.А. (Yermakov, N. A.) (June 1998). "ДЖОН КЕРНКРОСС САМЫЙ ЭФФЕКТИВНЫЙ РАЗВЕДЧИК ВТОРОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ. Почему Сталин не доверял Черчиллю. Немецкие шифровки читали не только в Лондоне, но и в Москве" [John Cairncross Most Effective Scientist Second World War. Why Stalin did not Trust Churchill. German encryption was read not only in London, but also in Moscow]. КТО есть КТО: Спецслужбы (Who is Who: Special Services) (in Russian). Archived from the original on 6 January 2009. Retrieved 7 January 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  17. ISBN 978-1-84513539-3
    .
  18. ISBN 978-1849540957
    .
  19. ISBN 978-1849540780
    . (Updated and extended version of Action This Day: From Breaking of the Enigma Code to the Birth of the Modern Computer Bantam Press 2001)
  20. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Retrieved 22 May 2021. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  21. ^ S.J.Hamrick (W.T.Tyler) Deceiving the Deceivers); Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2004.
  22. ^
    ISBN 978-1526736222
    .
  23. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, London, Penguin Books, 2000. note 13, p. 150
  24. ISBN 978-0750981477
    .
  25. ^ Stevenson, Richard W. (10 October 1995). "John Cairncross, Fifth Briton in Soviet Spy Ring, Dies at 82". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 June 2010.
  26. ^ 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.
  27. ISBN 978-0750981477
    .
  28. ^ "Rothschild 'spied as the Fifth Man'". The Independent. London. 22 October 1994. Retrieved 30 December 2020. Because he was in MI5 they learned things from him. This doesn't make him the fifth man, and he wasn't
  29. ^ a b Courtauld, Charlie (21 October 2001). "Rupert Allason: A reputation in tatters". The Independent. London. Retrieved 19 May 2020.
  30. ^ "John Cairncross, Fifth Man in Spy Ring, Dead at 82". AP News. 9 October 1995. Retrieved 30 December 2020.
  31. ^ "The silver spoon spy: how Cambridge double-agent Donald Maclean got away with it for so long". New Statesman. 29 April 2018. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  32. ^ "Review: The Last Cambridge Spy: John Cairncross, by Chris Smith". The Herald. Glasgow. 28 July 2019. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  33. ^ Cairncross, John (1997). The Enigma Spy.
  34. ISBN 9780712678841
    .
  35. ^ Davenport-Hines, Richard (2018). Enemies Within. p. 546.
  36. ISBN 978-0-7509-9172-8
    .
  37. ISBN 978-0750981477
    .
  38. ^ "Newsnight - John Cairncross". BBC Newsnight. 31 October 1990. Retrieved 30 December 2020.
  39. ^ Modin, Yuri (1997). "Chapter 4 (Люди в тени)". Судьбы разведчиков. Мои кембриджские друзья (The Fate of the Spies: My Cambridge Friends). Olma-Press.
  40. ISBN 978-1-929631-75-9
    .

External links
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