Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [110]
For reasons still unknown, John Cairncross was never prosecuted. Instead, he went to live abroad, and eventually joined a United Nations food agency. To this day, there are allegations of cover-ups; that Cairncross was the alleged ‘Fifth Man’, after Burgess, Philby, MacLean and Blunt, who had betrayed the whole of the British intelligence service to the Soviet Union. It also seems inconceivable that a man of his sympathies, openly expressed, could have passed the vetting to have worked in an establishment like Bletchley Park (without, that is, the authorities deciding for their own purposes to place him there).
But in general terms, what vetting was there? Certainly some veterans were aware that before they started work at the Park, discreet enquiries about their characters and lives had been made with headmasters and the like. They were left in no doubt that their lives had been thoroughly scrutinised.
To this day, Sheila Lawn is never entirely certain what process led her to the Park. ‘I simply came in because there was quite a tranche of people from the Scottish universities,’ she says. ‘And I suppose the fact that I had taken my name out of signing up to be a teacher, and into this – they may have thought, “Well she’s keen enough to do that.” I don’t know.’
This prompts her husband Oliver to recall: ‘When Sheila came – with this tranche from the Scottish universities – this other girlfriend that I had at the Park before Sheila was also one of them. There were quite a few from the Scottish universities. They were scouting quite carefully.’
Mrs Lawn herself recalls one unusual day at university before the summons for Bletchley came: ‘I was invited to my amazement by the principal and his wife to Sunday afternoon tea, and the other people there were a lot of senior, older students. I had a very pleasant tea, and chatted with people and so on – but it struck me as being very odd because I hadn’t heard of any of my own age group on my French/German course being invited.
So I thought, “I wonder what the reason for that tea was? Whether they just stick a pin in and say, ‘We’ll take this one, we’ll take that one’?” Though I didn’t feel in any way that I was being conscripted.’
As the Hon. Sarah Baring has mentioned, some of the debs were scrutinised only so far as to ensure that they were not madly in love with Hitler. And as for the codebreakers themselves? It wasn’t a question of old school tie so much as the old university gown. Also, given the youth of so many of the original intake of codebreakers and linguists, they would not have needed more than the usual check – there is a limit to the amount of seditious activity that an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old in pre-war Britain could have engaged in, give or take the odd Cambridge Apostle or two.
The same James Klugman who apparently recruited Cairncross to the Soviet cause was also implicated in another suspected security breach involving Bletchley a little later in the war. This involved Yugoslavia, and the apparent need to ensure that Churchill gave his backing to the partisan leader Josef Tito and not the Royalist leader Mihailovic.
Klugman was suspected by some of having secretly influenced the government decision to back the partisans, despite the fact that Tito and his supporters were Communist sympathisers, and almost certain to take post-war Yugoslavia down a Communist road. It was felt that the governance of the country would be best left to its people; but in the meantime, the government would support the side that appeared best placed to fight Hitler’s armies.
Documents uncovered in the 1990s appeared to show that information sent from Bletchley Park to Downing Street and the relevant Whitehall departments concerning the complex layers of the Yugoslav situation was somehow not reaching the people that it should.