John Cairncross (25 July 1913 – 8 October 1995) was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that may have influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. 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 an atomic 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. 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.

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. 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. Cairncross spent two years at Glasgow studying Modern Languages before acquiring a licence-és-lettres from the Sorbonne in Paris, which enabled him to win a Cambridge scholarship and also to bypass the first year of the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos. Viewed as a savant while at Cambridge – his college's undergraduate magazine remarked that he had the ability to learn "a new language every fortnight" – he graduated with first-class honours in French and German in 1936.

Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky believe Cairncross to have been an "open communist" when he came up to Cambridge in autumn 1934. And yet his brother Alec, who was also at Cambridge until 1935, did not recall any political activity back then, commenting in addition that John "was a prickly young man, who was difficult to argue with and resented things rather easily". Certainly, Cairncross's unsympathetic personality may have frustrated any chance he had of forming a political connection with his French literature supervisor at Trinity, Anthony Blunt, who by then was a convinced Marxist and was soon to become a talent-spotter for the Comintern. "I didn't like him," Cairncross later remarked of Blunt, "and he didn't like me." Indeed, in Cairncross's autobiography he describes his political orientation at Cambridge as discreetly and unobtrusively anti-Nazi rather than overtly left-wing, finding communist doctrine unrealistic and its policies too "anti-employer [and] pro-worker". He also insists in his book that he had no inkling of any "KGB operations" going on at the university while he was there.

Early professional career and recruitment as a spy

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. 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. Andrew and Gordievsky later revealed that in the Foreign Office entrance exam Cairncross was one hundred marks ahead of the next candidate, who was a fellow of All Souls. In 1937, while working at the Foreign Office, he was recruited as a spy for the Soviets. Initial attempts to bring him on side were made by Burgess and Blunt on the orders of Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet Union's leading spymaster in Britain, but without success. Deutsch then turned to James Klugmann of the Communist Party of Great Britain, an acquaintance of Cairncross at Cambridge and a fellow graduate in modern languages, who managed to 'bounce' Cairncross into becoming a spy by arranging to meet him in Regent's Park and then slipping away once Deutsch appeared from behind a tree. According to Richard Davenport-Hines, Cairncross was "largely inactive" as a Soviet agent until after the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1941. 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.

From 1942, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces High Command), or OKW, communicated with Army group commanders in the field using a machine that the British codenamed Tunny. 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.

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. Information based on decrypts was passed to the Soviets through official channels as from Agent "Boniface".

Operation Citadel

Operation Citadel was the codename given by Nazi Germany to their offensive which led to the Battle of Kursk. After being defeated at Kursk, the Wehrmacht retreated steadily until Berlin was taken.

Work 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 "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".

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.

In September 1951, he was questioned by British counterintelligence about his relationship with Maclean and the Communist Party. Philby had also informed the residency of this. While this did not include technical data, it provided the Soviet Union evidence that the British were considering the production of atomic weapons. He was never prosecuted, which later led to charges that the government engaged in a conspiracy to cover up his role.

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. 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.

Cairncross had resigned from the civil service in late 1952 and forfeited his pension. 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. "It was mere happenstance that he was at Cambridge with the others". 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.

This career was ended following further investigation into Cairncross by MI5 investigative officer Arthur S. Martin. After Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, Martin reopened the files to hunt for the fourth and fifth men in 1964. 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 as 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.

In 1967, Cairncross moved to Rome, where he worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as a translator, also taking on work for the Research Office of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), Banca d'Italia and IMI. After searching the Foreign Office lists, Penrose concluded that Cairncross was that spy and confronted him.

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. 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".

Cairncross corresponded with novelist Graham Greene for forty years and that correspondence is held by the John J. Burns Library, at Boston College.

Cultural representations

Cairncross is 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 Abwehr (German intelligence) and by Eastern Front military intelligence under General Gehlen. Anthony Blunt is depicted in the drama as pressuring him with threats.

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 the war.

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