Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [109]
Yet, despite the earlier Molotov/Ribbentrop pact, the fact remains that from 1941 to the end of the war, the Russians were, for coldheartedly pragmatic reasons, Britain’s allies. Was it therefore the blackest treachery to pass information to them that would help them in their fight against the Germans?
Authors such as Chapman Pincher and Christopher Andrew would emphatically – indeed, furiously – say yes. They argue that the actions of the Cambridge Spies resulted in the brutal deaths of a great many British agents whose identities had been betrayed. Added to this, the leaking of information throughout the war to Stalin gave him an unfair advantage in bargaining terms at the Yalta Conference. And of course, there was the gravest betrayal of all. In his later years, Cairncross denied that after the war he had passed on nuclear secrets to enable the Soviets to start their own atomic weapons programme. Yet such secrets were passed; and such secrets kept the Cold War in frost for decades and eastern Europe unwillingly under the thumb of an oppressive regime.
Despite the evidence of the Cairncross case, there was a huge amount of vigilance around the country. The general wartime assumption was that unusual or furtive behaviour would be immediately spotted by colleagues, and reported. During the war years, civilians would regularly report the suspicious behaviour of others to the authorities concerned.
Not only that, but they were highly effective in doing so. As a vivid example, in 1940, three German agents – two men and one woman – disembarked from a submarine off the coast of Scotland. They sailed by dinghy to the tiny fishing harbour of Port Gordon. There, having concealed the dinghy, and obviously dressed in civvies, they made their way through the village up to the railway station at the top of the hill.
At the station, one of the agents tried to buy train tickets for the three of them; he gave the station master a fifty-pound note. Never having seen such a thing in his entire life, the station master excused himself, went into his office and made a quiet telephone call about the three people ‘who didna’ seem right’. Minutes later, they were arrested. The outcome was that the two male spies were hanged.
As it happens, this was the village that my father was born and brought up in, and the story was repeated proudly throughout his childhood. The woman, my father says, ‘went on to marry someone in the village’. An exceedingly fine joke – but the point still stands that not only were ordinary people constantly on the alert for spies, they were perfectly right to be so.
The John Cairncross/Bletchley story also highlights something else that is rather striking; the fact that such major breaches of security – if indeed that is what it really was – did not happen more often.
There is a fascinating story in Andrew Sinclair’s study of the Cambridge Spies, The Red and the Blue, in which the motives and philosophy of such treachery was debated by Kim Philby and Malcolm Muggeridge at the villa of Victor Rothschild in Paris 1944 after the liberation. According to Sinclair, Rothschild ‘vehemently opposed Churchill’s decision to withhold from Stalin the Bletchley information about German battle plans on the eastern front’. He was not aware that John Cairncross had been smuggling some of that very information. Muggeridge told Rothschild that ‘caution over the Bletchley material was legitimate because the Russians had passed on to the Germans all they knew about the British during the Nazi-Soviet pact’.4 At this point, according to Sinclair, an outraged Philby declared that everything should be done to support the Red Army, even if it meant compromising the Bletchley material.
As Sinclair