WHEN GUY BURGESS’S flat was searched in 1951, security men found a bundle of handwritten notes confirming affairs inside the Treasury. There were also pen portraits of various officials written as though by a talent scout giving information about character weaknesses and other features that might be exploited. The notes dated from the early ’40s, and their continued existence was evidence of the carelessness and slovenliness in Burgess’s character, so atypical of a highly successful spy, as he undoubtedly was. The papers were not signed, and their author might never have been traced but for a fluke occurrence. An MI5 case officer, who had acquired a new secretary from Whitehall, sent for the file in which the papers happened to have been placed. She recognised the handwriting as that of her previous superior, a young civil servant called John Cairncross, who had been on the Treasury staff in Whitehall in 1940.
As it already seemed certain that Burgess had been a Soviet recruiter and active spy, it seemed likely that the Treasury information, which could have been of value to the Russians, had been provided as an espionage service.
It was known that Cairncross had been a scholarship boy from a poorly off home in Glasgow who had gone to Cambridge, where he had done brilliantly in modern languages. It was soon discovered that he had been an overt communist in 1935 when, though intending to pursue an academic career, he had suddenly changed course to enter the Foreign Office.
When confronted with the notes early in 1952 by MI5’s Arthur Martin, Cairncross denied being a spy or any kind of Soviet agent. He admitted having supplied the notes at Burgess’s request but said that he had no knowledge that Burgess was a Soviet agent and did not believe it could possibly be true.
As Cairncross had to concede that he had written the notes and that they contained some classified information, which could have been of value to a foreign power, and particularly to the Russians in their political negotiations with the Germans in 1940, he offered to resign. His resignation was accepted, and he obtained a post with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
The public heard nothing of this until after Blunt’s exposure in 1979, when Cairncross openly acknowledged his former communism and his unfortunate association with Burgess and Blunt. When questioned by journalists in Rome, he admitted that he had given Burgess the offending notes and had resigned as a consequence without a pension but, understandably, volunteered nothing further. He has, therefore, since been dismissed from the haul of known Soviet agents as ‘small fry’.
The truth is very different. As an active spy throughout the war, in highly sensitive positions, Cairncross was a ‘big fish’ and did great damage to his country.
While Blunt always attempted to cover his close friends during his interrogations, he was open about Cairncross, whom he seemed to dislike. He admitted having talent-spotted him as a potential spy while teaching him at Cambridge and having alerted Burgess to this effect, though the actual recruitment had been achieved by an even more sinister communist agent, James Klugman.
An MI5 officer therefore travelled to Rome to interrogate Cairncross, who, knowing that he was outside the jurisdiction of the British Official Secrets Act, made a complete and contrite confession of his treachery.
He admitted what the MI5 men already knew about his recruitment to the service of the KGB, explaining that he had experienced poverty and had concluded that Soviet-style communism was the only way of securing social justice, though he claimed that he had since realised he had been hopelessly misled in this respect by other Marxists.
He disclosed that Klugman had introduced him to the ubiquitous ‘Otto’ on a special visit to Regent’s Park, where they were unlikely to be seen. In accordance with the usual practice, ‘Otto’, who was also running Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, had instructed him to reject his open communism, go ‘underground’ and get himself into the Foreign Office instead of pursuing an academic career, as he would have preferred. Cairncross officially quit the Communist Party in late 1936.
Cairncross recalled how his Glaswegian accent was of some concern to ‘Otto’, who felt that he needed to improve his diction if he was ever to get into the top echelons of Whitehall. ‘Otto’ also advised him against marrying a ‘bourgeois’ wife because he had already lost a very promising agent, whom he had recruited at Cambridge, through marriage to a woman too ‘bourgeois’ to condone his spying for Russia. (MI5 is confident that it knows the identity of this short-time agent, who is now a life-peer.)
Acting on ‘Otto’s’ instructions, Cairncross competed for entry to the Foreign Office, passed top of his list and began work there in the German department, where Donald Maclean was also then located. Cairncross remained in the Foreign Office for two years, and he admitted that, after ‘Otto’ had been recalled to Moscow in September 1938, he handed his documentary material to Burgess, who passed it to Litzi Philby, Kim Philby’s estranged Austrian wife, who was then working in London as a full-time Soviet agent.
Litzi had been a militant communist, divorced and living with her parents in Vienna, where Philby had married her in 1934. He brought her to London soon afterward, and so superficial was the checking of entrants into the secret service that nobody in authority knew that Philby was married to a Russian spy until 1946, when he needed a divorce. Even then, no effective notice was taken of the fact.
In 1938, at the suggestion of his Soviet controllers, Cairncross applied for transfer to the Treasury. This is believed to have been preferred by the Russians because Maclean was already covering for them in the Foreign Office.
Cairncross admitted that in his early days he had been given money by the Russians but only in small amounts as expenses. This included the purchase price of a cheap motorcar to facilitate contacts with Soviet controllers outside London.
In 1942, after he had given Burgess the notes that ten years later were to betray him to a minor extent, he managed, because of his fluency in German, to get himself onto the staff of the most secret establishment involved in the war effort. This was the so-called Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, famous for its cracking of the German enigma-machine codes by the superbly ingenious processes known by the codename ‘Ultra’.
He worked there as an ‘editor’ dealing with air intelligence. He described how he used to visit London at weekends and pass ‘Ultra’ secret documents to his Soviet controller, who, at that stage, was ‘Henry’ – Anatoli Gorski. One batch, which he remembered with some pride, concerned details of the strength and dispositions of the Luftwaffe before the Battle of Kursk, an important turning point for the Russians. Cairncross received a commendation from Moscow for that effort, while ‘Henry’ was eventually awarded two Orders of Lenin for his espionage efforts in Britain. Later, a ‘man of military bearing’ took him over.
Cairncross also told his interrogators how, on another occasion, he had supplied information from Ultra sources that enabled the Russians to destroy hundreds of German aircraft on the ground. Sir Winston Churchill called the people at Bletchley ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled’. In fact, Cairncross cackled all the time – directly to the Russians.
With some force, Cairncross argued that he had only been assisting an ally and had therefore indirectly helped to defeat the common enemy, but, in fact, his behaviour was reprehensible in the extreme. The Russians were being given relevant information they needed by an official London–Moscow route, as I have described, but only after it had been dressed up to make it look as though it had been obtained from some other more conventional source.
The need to hide the truth that Bletchley Park was cracking the German codes day by day was paramount for the success of the eventual Allied invasion of Europe. Cairncross’s treachery meant that the Russians knew the true source, and, had this leaked to the Germans, he could have been the most damaging spy of the war. There were German spies in Russia who might have got hold of it, and it has been established that the KGB was in close touch with senior German intelligence and security officers who were taking out personal insurance against the possibility of a Nazi defeat. The defector Goleniewski revealed how one of these was Heinrich Muller, a notorious Gestapo chief. So it was not impossible that, at some stage, the Russians might have leaked the ‘Ultra’ secret deliberately to hold up the British–American advance while they overran more of Europe.
In 1944, Cairncross moved from Bletchley, then part of the secret service, to secret service Headquarters in London. The KGB did not object because they probably had other sources there, as records of deciphered Russian radio traffic suggest. I have talked to several of his former colleagues who remember him well. At first, he worked in German counter-intelligence, then switched to Yugoslav affairs, one of his field officers being Klugman, who was then based at Bari in Italy. Cairncross admitted that he continued to spy there so that the Russians secured a direct reading of the Allied plans concerning the future of Yugoslavia, a matter of great political significance to Moscow.
Cairncross remained in the secret service until the end of the war and then returned to the Treasury, where, colleagues recall, he was known as ‘Butch’ in spite of his slight build, or because of it. He never rose to eminence there but had excellent access to high policy documents and assessments of the UK economy, which, he admitted, he continued to hand over to the Russians.
In September 1945, with the war at an end, Cairncross, who until then had been meeting with his Soviet controller twice a week, was reduced to meeting once a month – as were Blunt and Burgess – because he did not have so much material to transmit. He remained in touch with the KGB and at the time of the Maclean and Burgess defection in 1951 was called to an emergency meeting with his controller in a wood in Surrey. It was decided that he was unlikely to become suspect and continued to spy actively from inside the Treasury until early in 1952, when he was challenged about the papers found in Burgess’s abandoned flat.
When he admitted the authorship of the papers but strenuously denied he had been any kind of agent, he was allowed to resign and move to Rome because that was all that MI5 knew about him then. He took care not to return to England because of his fear that more information about him may have come to light. Though the war was over, what he had done during it had been a capital offence, as was later pointed out to him by his interrogators. Cairncross said that the KGB had lost interest in him once he had left London, and that is believed to be true.
Cairncross was not granted immunity either from prosecution or publicity. On the contrary, he was told that if ever he came under British jurisdiction he would be prosecuted, which was a sure way of preventing his return to Britain. Offences against the Official Secrets Act are not extraditable.
His information about the part played in his recruitment to espionage by James Klugman, then a senior official of the British Communist Party, was the first hard evidence of Klugman’s treachery. So MI5 decided to use Cairncross to try to break Klugman into making a confession, which might uncover other spies. Cairncross was told that he could return for a limited visit to England without fear of prosecution if he agreed to help.
Acting on MI5’s instructions, Cairncross saw Klugman and, with some courage, threatened to expose him, pointing out the damage it would do to the Communist Party. He promised to keep quiet if Klugman would cooperate with MI5, but Klugman refused to do anything of the kind, and the attempt came to nothing. Klugman, who was a committed Stalinist, did all he could to undermine his own country and promote the Soviet Union until his timely death in 1977.
In the course of his long interrogations, both in Rome and in London, Cairncross identified several other Britons who had served the KGB. These included a senior civil servant who had also been recruited at Cambridge. He refused to be interviewed by security men but was nevertheless removed from access to secret information. This did not prevent his further promotion in the civil service or the award of an important honour. At the time of writing, he still has an influential political position.
Another Cambridge communist, who, according to Cairncross, had operated inside the Treasury and in the Cabinet Office, also refused to be interviewed. He, too, was later promoted in the civil service and is currently a director of a famous company.
Cairncross’s espionage activities for the Russians covered fifteen years, much of this time from positions providing access to highly secret intelligence. He must, therefore, be rated as an extremely damaging spy, far removed from the ‘small fry’ status previously awarded to him. But was he the Fifth Man of the Ring of Five? He had all the obvious attributes – recruited at Cambridge, a friend of Burgess and Blunt with early knowledge that Philby and Maclean were also Soviet agents. He was controlled by ‘Otto’ and then by ‘Henry’, who were both assigned to the Ring of Five. Like the other four, he was an eminently successful and damaging spy.
Evidence provided by defectors has, however, indicated that, while the Fifth Man of the original ring became a civil servant, he was also a scientist, which would rule Cairncross out. Furthermore, the security authorities do not think that Blunt would have been so forthcoming about the real Fifth Man as he was about Cairncross. Instead, he tried to shield the scientist who is believed to have been a member of the Ring of Five, as I shall now record.