Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [106]
Our next and last contact was when he invited me to lunch at the Travellers Club in February 1949, when he was back in the Treasury. In the middle of the meal he disconcertingly asked: ‘Are we still reading Russian ciphers?’ I had no first-hand knowledge of any current work on Russian, though I did know that on 22 June 1941 what work there was had been dropped, and the only off-putting response I could think of, on the spur of the moment, was to shake my head and mutter ‘One time’. He did not pursue this.2
It was in 1942 that Cairncross began regularly taking decrypts out of the Park in order to pass on to his controller Anatoli Gorsky at the Russian Embassy in London. His moral justification was, apparently, that he was unhappy at the way that Britain had been withholding vital military information from its Russian ally. In fact, from 1941, Churchill had for tactical reasons personally been feeding Stalin information gleaned from Bletchley Park; the more difficulties that Hitler encountered on the Eastern Front, the better for the Allies. However, the consequences of Cairncross’s actions could have been utterly catastrophic.
For while the Russians knew of the existence of Bletchley Park, they would not have known the exact provenance of the decoded messages issuing from there. And Russian internal security was defective and leaky – so there was the danger that their intelligence would alert the Germans to the fact that their traffic was being systematically decoded. In other words, Cairncross jeopardised the entire Bletchley Park operation – and with it, potentially, countless lives – for the sake of his ideological beliefs.
Actually, Cairncross managed to pass so much raw material over to his Soviet friends that alarms were sounded in the Lubianka; the Russians simply could not believe that it would be possible for one man to steal such intensely secret and sensitive material, carry it down to London and hand it over. A trap was initially suspected. No security system could conceivably be so permeable. But the Russians overcame these initial doubts and suspicions, shook their heads, acted upon the information – and found it all to be perfectly accurate. Thanks to Cairncross and his decrypts, for instance, they were given advance warning to develop tanks with stronger shells in the light of German armament reports.
Curiously, in the BBC drama Cambridge Spies, it was suggested that Cairncross felt terrific unease about sharing information with the Russians. According to the drama, Anthony Blunt started threatening him should he decide to hold back. And there are those who might even now take a more favourable view of Cairncross’s actions: that his information from Bletchley enabled the Soviets to win the Battle of Kursk, an obscure yet bloody engagement that took place near Kiev in 1943 – indeed, Cairncross himself was happy to claim almost full credit for it – and that such a victory helped towards the eventual defeat of Germany; that even though Cairncross’s actions were dangerous, with potentially horrifying consequences, they did, however obliquely, help towards the ending of the war.
Possibly it will be many years before we hear the whole truth. But the question arises, was MI6 really so blithely unaware of Cairncross? It was alarmingly unaware for some time of the activities of Philby, Burgess, MacLean and Blunt, it is true. But even though they were at the apex of Intelligence, those four didn’t work at the most sensitive establishment in the country, one near-miss aside. Might it have suited the British authorities for the Russians to be fed morsels of information at certain key times, to aid their fight against Germany?
The Germans invaded Russia in June 1941 in the action known as Operation Barbarossa, smashing the Molotov/Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939. It has been suggested by some that Churchill believed that Hitler would take this course as long ago as November 1940;