Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [105]
I had one promising interview, arranged by a mutual friend, with Frank Birch (before and after the war, a don at King’s College, Cambridge), a leading light in the Government Code and Cypher School, a cryptanalytical establishment which cracked enemy (and friendly) codes. He finally turned me down, on the infuriating ground that he could not offer me enough money to make it worth my while.1
We now see how much credit Frank Birch deserves for this decision, regardless of the reasons for it. Philby, along with Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean and Anthony Blunt, was of course one of the so-called ‘Cambridge Spies’, who had been engaged in passing information to the Russians since the 1930s. There is little question that, had he been hired, Philby would have tried to pass Bletchley decrypts to his Soviet controllers. As it happened, Philby was taken on by MI6. But the Bletchley authorities very wisely limited knowledge of its activities, to the extent that even a number of SIS operatives had no clear knowledge of what was being achieved there.
John Cairncross, meanwhile, had been at Cambridge, studying Modern Languages at Trinity College having gained a scholarship after attending Glasgow University. An intelligent, spikey man, a bit of a loner, he came to know Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. According to one account, he very much disliked them.
Blunt was interested in sounding Cairncross out in terms of doing some work for the Russians, but the antipathy between Cairncross and Blunt was too strong. But then Cairncross met the Marxist James Klugman. It was Klugman who persuaded him – by rather underhand means, according to Cairncross himself – to provide help for the Soviet cause.
Cairncross joined the Foreign Office in 1936. Around that time, Klugman arranged to meet him in Regent’s Park in London, seemingly for purely social reasons. But as soon as Cairncross arrived at the rendezvous, he wrote in a memoir, a round, moon-faced man appeared from behind a tree and introduced himself as ‘Otto’. He was KGB. Klugman made his excuses and left ‘Otto’ and Cairncross to it. ‘Otto’ wanted Cairncross to work for the Russians.
In his memoir, Cairncross professed to have been acting out of a burning zeal to see Nazism defeated; the best means for this to be achieved was by co-operation with Soviet Russia. But in this account, he also suggests extra motivations, including blackmail (fear of losing his Foreign Office position) and money (the need to live at a smarter address and not in a dowdy west London suburb). The Molotov/Ribbentrop pact of 1939 made his life distinctly uncomfortable.
During the war, Cairncross became private secretary to Lord Hankey, who had a general supervisory role over the intelligence services. In this capacity, between 1940 and 1942, Cairncross would have had direct access to the decrypts coming from Bletchley Park. After a brief spell of army training, Cairncross came to Bletchley itself in 1942, as a captain, and joined Hut 3. A Bletchley Park cryptographer called Henry Dryden recalled Cairncross in a postscript he wrote of an account of his own time at the Park:
John Cairncross and I went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1934, he as a Major Scholar and I as an Exhibitioner in Modern Languages. Whilst we were not close friends, I saw something of him at lectures and supervisions, and once at a cocktail party for the Trinity Cell of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which I had just joined.
This was a surprise, because he had never given me the impression of being politically inclined. I handed back my CPGB card in January 1935, my brief flirtation having ended in disillusionment.
After graduating, we went our separate ways. It was probably in December 1942, whilst on a liaison visit from Cairo to BP, that I bumped into him in the passage of Hut 3, having not seen or heard of him since