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Born in Scotland, John Cairncross came from a long line of civil servants. He entered Cambridge in the early 1930's to study modern languages and wasalmost immediately converted to Communism by Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgesswho turned him over to their NKVD controller, Samuel Cahan. Given a shortcourse in espionage, Cairncross had joined the Foreign Office by 1936.During World War II, he worked at the Government Code and Cipher School,then part of SIS, at Bletchley Park. A large number of important codes and ciphers used by GC & CS and the Allies were copied by Cairncross and passe to the Soviet Union. He later admitted that he had decoded German messages and driven straight to the Soviet Embassy to make the delivery. The Soviets had even provided the car. Later in the war, Cairncross moved into the Broadway headquarters of SIS. From the mid-1930's to 1952, Cairncross had been a dedicated Soviet mole. He provided secret information on the German military to the Soviet Union during and after the war. Cairncross also passed considerable amounts of secret material to other members of the Cambridge spy ring and indeed to other Soviet contacts.
Cairncross first came under suspicion in 1951, when Blunt in the haste of clearing out incriminating material from Burgess's flat in London following his friends defection, missed notes on British Economic Policy written by Cairncross. Interviewed later by MI5, Cairncross admitted passing only low grade official material to the Soviets and to avoid yet another security scandal, he was allowed to resign without being prosecuted. MI5 finally caught up with Cairncross in 1964. Confronting him with insurmountable evidence of his involvement with the Soviet intelligence services provided by Blunt, he confessed in return for again not being prosecuted. Cairncross was undoubtedly one of the Soviet Unions most important intellience coups and his immunity was granted as much to hide his importance than in return for for his co-operation. The British Government and Security services were determined to avoid yet another highly damaging public spy scandal. Cairncross was then given a "safe" job at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome and on his retirement settled permanently in Italy. |
