Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [108]
What makes the Cairncross story doubly astonishing, though, is the apparent ease with which such raw messages could be spirited out of Bletchley Park in the first place. When his flat was raided by the security services in 1951, they found thousands of incriminating documents; in a ten-year period he passed on some 6,000 documents to the Kremlin. In the Robert Harris novel a stolen scrap of encrypted text is hunted down and proves difficult to hide. Yet here, it seemed, one man could walk out of the Park with wodges of such material with impunity.
Almost paradoxically, it does not appear that Bletchley – the most secret operation in the country – was officially policed in any heavy-handed sense. For instance, those leaving the Park did not seem to be subject to routine searches. Nor was any sort of track kept upon movements – or, at least, none that was noticed, even by spies. Nevertheless, Cairncross’s own account of this information-smuggling strains credibility now. He wrote:
… there was no problem about obtaining the German decrypts for they were left around on the floor after having been processed. I also added to these the collections of my translations into English, since they expanded the coverage. I concealed the documents in my trousers in order to pass them out of the grounds, where I was never subjected to a check. I then transferred them into my bag at the nearby railway station.
After that, they were handed to Henry [his codenamed Soviet handler] in an envelope at some spot in the suburbs of west London. I would meet him at the entrance to the tube station, follow him to the platform and get out of the train when he got off. I would then trail him to a quiet spot, where the envelope was handed over.3
One wonders if security could really have been that relaxed. Is it not more reasonable to suspect that the Park authorities and MI5 knew exactly what this man was up to and simply fed him scraps of information that might have minimised damage? Given, for instance, all the tiny accidental leaks which were so efficiently cracked down upon, it is practically impossible to imagine that anyone could walk out of such an establishment, having found exactly the decrypts he needed handily scattered about – among all those fractions of messages and weather reports and other miscellany – and then jammed them into his trousers.
As mentioned, in his memoir, Cairncross appears vaingloriously to claim the entire credit for the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk. According to historian Martin Gilbert: ‘An Enigma message at the end of April … confirmed that the German intention on the eastern front was to cut off the Soviet forces in the Kursk salient by means of a pincer movement … These facts were passed from London to Moscow on April 30.’ Several hours before the German attack was to begin, the Russians attacked first, hitting the artillery lines: they had had prior warning.
As codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts now recalls, however: ‘We were able to warn the Russians that the Germans were planning this – how the attack was going to be launched, and the fact that it was going to be a pincer movement. We were able to warn them what army groups were going to be used. And most important, what tank units were going to be used.
‘Now I can remember myself, strangely enough, breaking messages about Kursk. You know, the name sticks in your mind. We had to wrap it all up and say it was from spies, that we had wonderful teams of spies, and other sources of information.’ If any credit at all is to be claimed, is it not then more reasonable to surmise that the Bletchley Park command was one step ahead of Cairncross, who was clearly a strange, bitter man?
But what of those who sought to aid the Soviets without the British authorities learning of it? Recently, the British Library published, some twenty-five years after his death, a 30,000 word memoir written by Anthony Blunt; in it, far from expressing remorse, he seems more agitated by the sense of