GEOFF ANDREWS: Thanks very much.
And thanks for
welcoming me to Google.
I know you've had somebody
talking about other spies
and espionage.
It's obviously a theme here.
So want to ask why, but--
John Cairncross, quite a
different spy from the one
that Owen Matthews
was describing,
I think, a short while ago.
I call him an unlikely spy.
He's the fifth member of
the Cambridge spy ring.
He was the last
recruited and the last
to be publicly exposed, and he
is also the least well known.
I'm sure some of you have read
accounts of the other four,
perhaps also seen fictionalized
portraits of the other four.
You might have seen "The
Imitation Game," which
also has a portrait of
John Cairncross, which
I'll talk about a bit later.
I say he's an unlikely spy.
He's very much an enigma.
I mean, in a way, they all
appear a bit as an enigma.
I mean, who would have believed
that Kim Philby, privileged son
of an Arabic scholar, destined
for a brilliant career
at the foreign office, would
side with the Russians?
Who would have thought
that Guy Burgess,
the Etonian inveterate gossip,
thought incapable of keeping
the most basic of secrets,
would be deemed to write
for Soviet intelligence?
Or Donald Maclean, continually
in awe of his Presbyterian
and liberal party father,
became the ideal spy,
as Roland Phillips argues
in his recent book.
What drove Anthony
Blunt, the son of a vicar
from Bournemouth, member
of the [? Bloomsbury ?] set
who had barely encountered
the working classes--
what drove him towards
communism and espionage?
And for this 1930s
generation-- and obviously
that generation is
distinctive in many ways,
partly because of the
international crisis
around fascism, the
attraction of communism,
the Spanish Civil War, the
hunger marches, and so on.
I think it's fair to
say that people looking
at that generation, looking at
why people in that generation
were drawn to be Soviet spies,
have taken particular profiles
and have focused on
privileged family
backgrounds, the
conversion to communism
while being a student.
In some cases, a psychological
profile, certainly
Donald Maclean, as
Roland Phillips argues,
was partly responding
to a kind of alienation
from in awe of his father.
None of these really apply--
or I would say they apply in
a very different way to John
Cairncross.
Some not at all,
others only marginally.
Other reasons for espionage
more broadly, besides it
is blackmail on grounds
of sexuality, financial
motivations, and so on.
Again, these don't really
fit into the character
of John Cairncross.
I'll tell you a
bit more about him
because I know that his
story is not widely known,
and then hopefully you'll
go on and read the book
and get even more about it.
He was very much an outsider.
As you will know, perhaps
about from the Cambridge spies,
very little of the
action actually
takes place in Cambridge.
In fact, by the time
he went to Cambridge,
three of the other spies
had already graduated
and weren't there.
Only Anthony Blunt, who was on a
research fellowship, was there.
He had no idea, Cairncross--
he was a member of a ring,
and he had no idea,
throughout his time,
throughout the period in
which was passing material
to the Russians, that
the others were spies.
I mean, he knew them,
not well, but knew them
in different ways.
Obviously, they
knew he was a spy
and indeed contributed
to his recruitment.
But he was unaware of that.
He was born in
1913 in Lesmahagow,
in the Clyde Valley, some
25 miles from Glasgow.
It was then a village
characterized partly
by the mines in Coalburn nearby.
Quite a mixed, social class
background of his fellow pupils
and families.
He went to school with the
children of miners and farmers.
He was from a lower
middle class background.
His father was an iron monger.
He was the youngest
of eight children.
It was a highbrow
family, let's say,
if it's not
particularly wealthy.
But the parents, particularly
the mother-- the father
was quite remote, Presbyterian,
shrewd, slightly gruff business
man who didn't converse
much over lunch and so on.
Cairncross, being the
youngest, felt very remote
from his father.
It was almost like he
was a grandfather figure.
But the mother was
very supportive
of children's education.
And the daughters went
on to be school teachers.
Two of his brothers
became professors.
Alec Cairncross, quite
a well known economist,
chief advisor to the government.
And his next brother
up, Andrew Cairncross,
was an expert on Shakespeare.
And John Cairncross
himself, for a brief moment
until the FBI
caught up with him,
was a professor of
romance languages
at Western Reserve University
in Cleveland, Ohio.
So it was quite a
highbrow family.
The accounts you might have
seen of John Cairncross,
he appears as a sort of figure
in various general accounts
of the Cambridge spies.
Might have given you a picture.
But a lot of them
are inaccurate.
For example, he
wasn't influenced
by the Clydeside militancy
of Glasgow in that period.
He wasn't a member
of the Red Clydeside.
He wasn't a pawn
of Anthony Blunt.
If you've seen the BBC
dramatization, the "Cambridge
Spies," it depicts him as
somebody influenced by Blunt,
acting on his orders, and so on.
By the time that Cairncross
reached Cambridge,
he'd done quite a lot before.
He knew a lot more about
French literature, and so on,
than Blunt did, and indeed
was quite a confident student.
In the "Imitation
Spies," he's played
by one of the "Downton
Abbey" actors,
the chauffeur in
"Downton Abbey."
And the lean
Cairncross is played
as a short, chubby
figure in this.
He was depicted as blackmailing
Alan Turing, if you've
seen the film--
somebody he never met, let
alone never worked with.
And so the lines
between fact and fiction
are blurred very much in
the case of John Cairncross,
making him more of
a mystery figure.
One thing I would say
is that the publications
on the Cambridge
Spies have improved
markedly since the
opening of the archives
after the Berlin Wall.
Before that date,
people were relying
on writers like
Chapman Pincher, who
got all his information
from Peter Wright, the MI5
[INAUDIBLE] spymaster.
But of course, the archives
hadn't been opened.
So since then, there
have been much better--
been more interesting,
historically-grounded research
on the Cambridge Spies.
And I've been lucky
that, in addition
to the papers available, John
Cairncross, later in life,
married a woman much
younger than himself,
Gayle Brinkerhoff,
American opera singer.
And she provided-- made
his papers available.
And other family papers of--
were given to me, as well.
I should say, the
Cairncross family,
when I describe
them as highbrow,
continues to be well known.
His niece, Alec's daughter,
Dame Frances Cairncross was,
of course--
led the recent
"Cairncross Review"
into the future of
journalism-- some of you
may have been aware of.
So it was a highbrow family.
Actually, his uncle,
T.S. Cairncross,
the brother of his father,
was an early influence
on the Scottish poet
Hugh MacDiarmid.
And so there was, in the
family, this intellectual--
impressive
intellectual heritage.
Taken together, these
secondary portraits,
the fictional accounts
of John Cairncross,
have led to misunderstanding
and misrepresentation,
in my view, of his motivations
as a spy, his motivations
for spying.
He does share, like all spies,
the compartmentalization
of his life.
And so when he was spying--
he was recruited in 1937.
And he resigned from the
civil service in 1952,
and he went to Italy
after the disappearance
of Burgess and Maclean.
Nobody knew of his spying,
not even his closest relatives
and family.
When his brother was told
about his espionage in 1964--
he was then Alec Cairncross,
chief economic advisor
to the government-- it was the
greatest shock of his life.
So again, the question of
leading different lives,
leading a secret life, was
also something he did share
with the other spies.
When I was looking
through his papers,
the most important
document I came across
was a diary he
kept in 1932, which
was an account of his travels
to Germany and Austria.
Now, previous accounts,
including, I should say,
an edited version of
his autobiography, which
was published after
his death and is based
on different papers and memoirs
he had written, put together,
also gets the date wrong.
The date usually given is 1934.
There was a big difference
between 1932 and 1934,
because Hitler came
to power in 1933.
And the whole international
situation was different.
But it also is different trying
to understand Cairncross,
because in 1932, he was a
young Glasgow University
student, 19 years old,
traveling for the first time
outside Scotland, helped by
a great capacity, facility
for languages.
He spoke-- that was
his area of study.
Became a great linguist,
expert on Moliere--
which also, of course,
was his Soviet codename,
given to him by
his Moscow bosses.
But he was one of
the authorities on--
wrote three books on Moliere.
And his translations of
Racine, also very significant.
So he was a scholar
as well as a spy.
But as 19 years of old--
so 19 years of age, he
had read a little of Marx.
He'd read the French classics.
He was influenced a bit by the
Scottish enlightenment thinker
David Hume.
He had a little sympathy
for Scottish nationalism,
but no great political views.
And so when he was traveling
around Germany and Austria,
picking up these
signs of fascism,
at the same time admiring great
works of art and going to all
the galleries and exhibitions
and being very much impressed--
a very eye-opening journey--
he was somebody in search
for principles to live by.
And this was a very important
influence on his life.
It was very eye-opening.
So eye-opening was
it that he decided
to move his studies
from Glasgow to Paris,
and spent two years
at the Sorbonne.
In 1933, the other very
decisive moment in his life
occurred when he met members of
the Italian antifascist exile
group called Justice
and Liberty, the members
of the Carlo Rosselli group.
There's recently
been a very good book
by Caroline Moorehead
about this group.
They were-- a lot of Jewish
intellectuals opposed
to Mussolini had been
forced into exile.
And they were, like many
others, exiled in Paris.
And John Cairncross met
these exiled Italians
and was very moved by what
they told him, which was he
had to work in an organized,
underground way in order
to-- had to work from abroad and
publish pamphlets and take part
in other acts of
espionage outside Italy.
Now, we can debate the extent
to which Italy under Mussolini
can be compared to Britain under
[? Borden ?] and Chamberlain
and so on.
But he certainly was
influenced by that meeting.
And of course, the
very interesting thing
about those meetings
is that they
both occurred before
he even thought
of going up to Cambridge.
And so a lot of his--
a lot of the influences on
his life, on his politics,
on his decisions to make
that fateful decision to spy
for the Russians were made
before he went to Cambridge.
And I think partly because the
date of the diary is mistaken,
and partly because it wasn't
available in its entirety,
and for other reasons, he's
been much misunderstood
on that basis.
He did go to Cambridge.
By now, he'd already been
a student for four years,
two in Glasgow and two in Paris.
Another two at Cambridge.
So when he arrived
in 1934, his brother
was already doing a PhD
under John Maynard Keynes--
one of Keynes' early students.
He was an experienced student.
Like his brother, he
was slightly suspicious
of English upper middle class
habits and the Cambridge
establishment, if
that's the right word.
But he was mainly a
very motivated scholar
of French and German.
Indeed, I came across the son
of his best friend at Cambridge.
His best friend at Cambridge
was Douglas [? Pomay. ?]
They were taught by a
Moliere expert, Harry Ashton.
And in talking to his
son and everything
and looking at
correspondence, it's
quite clear that they knew far
more about French literature
than Anthony Blunt did,
who was an expert on art,
but he himself was still
a junior research fellow.
So the possibility of Cairncross
being influenced by Blunt
diminishes, in my view.
He also, of course,
wasn't impressed with--
I know Blunt's been portrayed
in the recent Netflix series.
Blunt wasn't somebody
to whom he would
have given much respect for
their knowledge of literature.
And also, he wasn't
impressed by the sort
of social posturing of Blunt.
The interesting
thing about anybody
who's read any
Moliere is this satire
on the manners of early--
modern society and so on.
And certainly, that was
also quite revealing.
The other thing
it's revealing was
that, although he was great
friends with the leading
communist at Cambridge,
James Klugmann, who
was the subject of my
last biography-- in fact,
I came across the
idea for the book
after writing a
book about Klugmann
and meeting John
Cairncross's widow.
James Klugmann was
a great persuader
of impressionable
students, converting
liberal-minded
people to communism.
But Cairncross himself
was not in this category.
He was already a man of the
world, exactly, but certainly
somebody who was
well read and so on.
He also wouldn't have been
impressed particularly
by the hunger marchers who
marched through Cambridge.
And that was-- this
was very decisive
for people like Burgess,
Philby, and others.
And Blunt, perhaps, as well--
who hadn't really experienced
the working classes
until this point-- had a
very limited experience
with the working classes,
whereas Cairncross
had been to school
with them, if you like.
So he wasn't-- again, it wasn't
a defining moment for him.
Now, why did he join
the communist group?
Well, one, because
they had, at that time,
the strongest position
against fascism.
I was amused to read Emily
Thornberry's statement
the other day-- one of the
labor leadership candidates--
where she said the
Labor Party was
leading the fight against
Franco and fascism.
In fact, had a position
of non-intervention
at that time, which
drove a lot of people
into the Communist Party
and other left-wing groups.
George Orwell, for example, was
in the Independent Labor Party.
So it had a position on fascism
that he thought was consistent.
And the other thing, as
someone who was very--
would say, if not
intellectually elitist,
somebody who was
at least impressed
by intellectuals and ideas--
and the communists had
the best intellectuals.
They all got firsts.
And they were impressive
for this reason.
That's something else that
would have impressed him.
He also shared Harry Ashton,
his tutor, with Klugmann, who--
Harry Ashton was Klugmann's
postgraduate PhD supervisor.
So those are important reasons.
I should also say
that lots of people
who joined the Communist
Party were not what you would
call ideological communists.
And I would put
Cairncross in that camp.
In other words, he didn't
believe in Marxist view
of class struggle.
He didn't believe in the
labor theory of value.
He didn't believe in the red
paradise, the Soviet Union,
that others did at that time.
He was a much
looser affiliation.
Incidentally, give an example of
how loose the affiliation was--
Charles Rycroft,
later a psychiatrist,
was one of Klugmann's recruits
to communism, liberal minded.
And he said you could fit in
very well, because you could
go on a demonstration in
London, stop at the Reform
Club for lunch, carry on with
the demonstration afterwards.
Such was the sort of liberalism
of the communist case
at that time.
Cairncross is probably less
of a communist, actually,
than Denis Healey,
the later Labor
minister who was in the
Communist Party at Oxford.
He was organizing the culture--
the discussions in the cultural
section after "Guernica"
and so on.
So he wasn't an
ideological communist,
but was impressed by
the communists' attitude
to life, as many other
people were at that time.
You can find all
kinds of people who--
Denis Healey calls it a
bed and breakfast party--
join the Communist Party one
day and left the other day.
After graduating
with a first, he
left and decide to go
into the foreign office.
Again, he's much--
he's not really--
in some ways was very
unsuited to the civil service
and the foreign office.
He was much more of an
academic, and should
have been an academic, and
indeed, was later briefly
an academic.
He wasn't in the right
sort of social circles,
I think, to say-- to have
professors recommending him
to do postgraduate research.
That was one reason, possibly.
Another reason-- he didn't
want to be a financial burden
on his parents.
And so he chose to go
to the foreign office.
He came top in both the foreign
office and the civil service
exams, which is a bit
of a record at the time.
"The Glasgow Herald"
was very proud to see
one of its boys doing so well.
He first met Donna Maclean
in the foreign office.
He moved to the Spanish section
in the Western department
of the foreign office in 1937,
which was, again, significant.
And one of the interesting
things about Cairncross
is that he was in the Spanish
section of the foreign office
during the Spanish
Civil War, and he
was in the German section--
the Central department--
at the time of the
Munich Agreement, 1938,
where Chamberlain came to this
deal with Hitler, and so on.
Those two things are
quite significant.
And so Cairncross would annotate
these reports coming back
from Spain.
And being outspoken
and not given to--
not being very
diplomatic, if you like,
in the diplomatic
service, he would
write comments-- "this
man is a fascist"
and so on-- and generally
wind people up in the office.
He was also a poor
administrator,
according to reports.
So he didn't come
across very well there.
He was regarded
as a bit truculent
and irascible and so on.
He didn't fit into the
conventions, being, perhaps,
low middle class and Scottish.
So this didn't go down
well with his employers.
Indeed, he was
constantly moved sections
throughout his civil
service career.
In 1937, he was recruited
to Soviet intelligence by--
well, by Klugmann with a
bit of help from Burgess,
who tried to push him
in that direction.
Had lunch with him and
Anthony Blunt in Cambridge.
Met him in Paris, invited
him to a gay bar in Paris.
Cairncross was less
inclined to attend.
That didn't work.
And so they went to
James Klugmann, who
was an orthodox communist, and
he carried out the deed very
John McCarry style--
meeting Otto in
Regent's Park, Klugmann
disappearing into the bushes.
And Otto, an Austrian
cosmopolitan intellectual,
recruited all the
Cambridge spies.
Had a discussion with him
about fascism and Germany
and Austria, and
empathized with what
he'd seen on his cycling trip.
And agreed to be recruited.
And like all of them,
they weren't asked,
do you want to work for
Soviet intelligence?
They were asked, do you want
to make a big contribution
to the anti-fascist cause?
And then, on that basis, he was
recruited-- naively, no doubt,
and with fateful consequences.
Burgess, who played some part
in his recruitment, said this.
This is from Nigel West's--
Nigel West is a spy writer who
had the benefit of early access
to the Moscow archives.
Some of them have since
been closed to researchers,
so reliant on this work.
"I had long talks
with Klugmann"--
this is Burgess talking
about Cairncross.
"I had long talks
with Cairncross
on French and English
ideas, on French history.
And so we moved onto politics.
He was led by purely
cultural considerations,
in contrast to social
and radical ones.
In his view, Marxism, from
a cultural point of view,
can contribute to the solution
of theoretical problems.
And he discussed
these questions from--
with us from that angle.
He was never a member of
the party in the real sense,
but I think we should work
with him and involve him,
though I am inclined to
think that it would not
be entirely without danger
to approach him directly."
Immediately after
he was recruited,
Burgess says this of him--
"he's never had the time or
the money to enjoy himself.
He has always suppressed himself
and denied himself everything
for the sake of the future.
Though I think we may
count on his goodwill,
nevertheless, his personality
is fraught with many dangers.
He comes from a lower middle
class family and is of humbler
origin than I. He speaks with
a strong Scottish accent,
and one cannot call
him a gentleman."
And he kind of--
looking at this, and
you wonder whether it's
his lack of ideological
orthodoxy or not being
a gentleman that's
most upset Burgess
in the divisions between them.
This is what Cairncross
says the day after,
or perhaps even shortly after
the meeting with Deutsche,
with Otto.
"I made my way home in a taxi.
I immediately took
a strong drink,
and the good and bad
aspects of the meeting
flashed through my mind.
For my reaction was
not just one of shock.
I was still eager to
work in any way I could--
but not as a Soviet agent,
but for the alliance
between our two countries."
That's the Soviet
Union and Britain.
"But in addition, I recalled
how my Italian refugee
friend in Paris had
talked of the organization
of an anti-fascist
movement in his country
and how he had always insisted
on the need for expert guidance
in building up a
resistance movement.
If there was no
support, the price
to be paid in life and
freedom was immense.
And so I thought how this
expert knowledge could perhaps
be exploited, since
I had so little faith
in the British resistance,
should Britain ever
be invaded or capitulate,
to help organize
an underground movement, on the
assumption that one must always
prepare for the worst even
if one does not expect it."
And so that is the
conclusion he reached.
Now, we can criticize
the naivety and so on.
But it seems to be
clear to me that there's
a link between his
earlier experiences
and his decision to
work for the Soviets.
And then, of course,
this increased further
when he moved to the German
department at the end of 1937.
This was headed
by William Strang,
who was a very well-known--
"well-known," but distinguished
diplomat, fellow Scot.
Had a long experience of
work in the foreign office.
And Strang was the person
who accompanied Churchill
to all these fateful meetings.
Sorry, accompanied Chamberlain.
What a mistake.
He accompanied Chamberlain to
all these fateful meetings.
And what Cairncross picked
up from Strang returning
and from other people in the
office and so on, he passed on.
These are details about what
we now know as appeasement--
all the discussions between
the British Foreign Office
and Germans, which Moscow
was very interested in.
The other contribution,
indirectly and inadvertently,
that Strang made, if you like--
which we might think is slightly
odd by today's standards
but significant at the time--
was to recommend Cairncross
to the Traveler's Club, one
of the gentlemen's clubs
in Mayfair, where a lot
of the work was done.
A lot of the spies were
members of these clubs.
And indeed, over lunches with
members of the foreign office
and other civil servants,
people close to politics,
he picked up this information.
And it was his summaries
of these conversations--
Cairncross's summaries of
these conversations that
fell into the lap of Guy
Burgess in a meeting they had--
Burgess knowing full
well that Cairncross
had been recruited, Cairncross
unaware that Burgess
was working for the Soviets--
again, naivete,
really, on his part.
And when Burgess's flat
was being inspected
after he disappeared,
1951, these
were the documents that
were held in Burgess's flat,
in Cairncross's handwriting.
And so it's this
document, these summaries
of his views on appeasement
that incriminated, if you like,
Cairncross, and led
to his resignation
from the civil service in 1952.
What I would say is
that Cairncross was not
an ideological communist.
He was a contrarian.
He was somebody who
was an outsider.
In a way, he didn't
subscribe to any orthodoxy,
whether it was Marxist
orthodoxy or the procedures
of the civil service.
He was just somebody who was
always critical of authority,
if you like, or skeptical
about authority.
But one thing he was
consistently opposed to
was appeasement.
You could almost say
there's one ideology he had,
if you can call it an ideology.
It was his opposition
to appeasement.
And Tim Bouverie's book
recently has reminded us
of the importance
of appeasement,
which has been lost, I think,
in more recent accounts.
And appeasement, in
a sense, appealed
to both left and right.
It wasn't just a right-wing
thing, obviously associated
with Chamberlain.
But a lot of pacifist
groups on the left
had a similar position.
And indeed, in the
debate about Munich--
after Munich, in the House
of Commons, George Lansbury--
he was a former--
a Labor leader.
So had met Hitler and Mussolini.
And they're just like
meeting any other diplomats.
We need to follow
reasonableness.
And so it was a-- but
it was a big issue.
And for Cairncross, it was
the biggest political issue.
The other concern
he had at the time
was the support for
German positions,
for German politics
from within the UK.
And this was anti-Semitic
organizations
like the Nordic
League, the Right Club.
Some of their files are
now being released by MI5.
There was, as he saw it,
to use today's terminology,
a part of the
establishment that was
pro-German as a bulwark
against communism.
And so this was another
factor in the debate.
Now, Burgess and
Philby both worked,
as a way of losing their
communist identity,
to appear as having made
a big shift in politics,
to appear as less
suspicious as spies,
had aligned themselves with
some of these organizations
through the
Anglo-German fellowship.
Philby was actually
working for them,
doing their
newsletter and things.
That was a kind of U-turn
they were prepared to take.
Such a U-turn, in
my view, would have
been against all
Cairncross's principles.
He just wasn't made up of
that sort of character.
He was guilty, perhaps,
of other things,
but not of that
form of deception.
Cutting a long story short,
Deutsche, Otto, was partly
a victim of the purges, was at
least recalled, as others were.
And he was then taken over
by other Soviet controllers
who were more orthodox.
Otto was somebody one could
have a discussion with about
German philosophy.
His successors were much
more orthodox and unyielding,
let's say.
He continued to
move, usually moved
by his head of departments as
a unsatisfactory probationer.
At the end of 1940, he managed
himself to initiate a move
to be private secretary
to Lord Hankey, who
was a very distinguished
civil servant coming
to the end of his career.
And it was while
working for Lord Hankey
that he picked up details of
the Tube Alloys project, which
was the initial decision
to develop nuclear weapons
and the use of the atom bomb.
These were documents he passed
on to his new controller,
Gorsky, called Henry.
And for that reason,
Cairncross has been described
as one of the early atom spies.
Again, looking at
this critically,
the amount of
information he could
have given at that
time, the lack of his--
not being a scientist
but being a linguist,
the amount of knowledge he
would have had is very limited.
And I noticed that in
Christopher Andrew's history
of MI5, he doesn't appear in
the section of atom spies.
So again, I think that
something's probably
been exaggerated.
After working for Hankey,
he moved to Bletchley Park
where, of course, he's depicted
in the "Imitation Game."
He's working in hut
three, which is composed
of the translators who
translated the decrypts
from the cryptographers.
This he thought was
much more interesting.
It was a bit like translating a
text from Moliere or something.
And he didn't like,
however, the working hours.
Again, he was only there
10 months, not four years,
as some accounts have had it.
And actually, he was not well
known to colleagues, let alone
meeting somebody like Turing,
who was in a different section
and hut entirely.
His major contribution,
of course,
was giving information
in the lead-up
to the Battle of Kursk,
which is the biggest tank
battle in history,
and information
he provided-- we don't know
exactly to what extent.
But information he provided
contributed to a very important
Soviet victory.
There was a big fuss
afterwards about this,
whether he had given the
Soviet order of merit,
or whatever it was.
I don't know if anybody's
been to Bletchley Park,
but it's certainly worth seeing.
They've now preserved
all the existing huts
in their original
form and so on.
You can get to see how
life was like, what tough,
austere conditions.
You're working very hard.
And obviously, some
terrific amount
of work, groundbreaking
work, was carried out
crucial to the war effort--
and of course, itself was
kept secret for many years,
until the 1970s.
If you go, you must go
into the souvenir shop
where you can pick up a
copy of the Bletchley Park
version of Cluedo, which is--
sets out their version
of the mystery game, Who
Killed the Bletchley
Park Spy, where there's
a reference to our friend.
"Yesterday, security
staff at Bletchley Park
started an
investigation following
the discovery of a body of
intelligence officer John
Blackcross.
Rumors about Blackcross's
communist sympathies
have been circulating
for several months,
with many believing that
he was a spy who was
selling the park's secrets."
And one of the interesting
things about the Bletchley Park
view of Cairncross
is that they kind of
acknowledge him
as a code breaker
but don't put him in
their roll of honor.
It's a bit of a--
it's a slightly awkward
one, as you can see.
So anyway, he
turns up in Cluedo.
So have a go at that.
From Bletchley Park,
with the help of one
of his old French tutors--
so he wasn't above benefiting
from patronage to some extent--
he moved on to MI6, initially
working at St. Albans
until it moved back to London.
Somebody working much
higher up than him
was Kim Philby, who'd go on
to lead counter-espionage.
Cairncross was in a
very lowly position,
not really advancing at
all in the foreign office,
passing on lots of documents
on German military espionage,
more German movements on the
Eastern Front, and so on.
Probably the most significant
development for him
personally when in MI6 was
his meeting with the writer
Graham Greene, who was also
working in that department
under Kim Philby at the time.
Graham Greene turned out to
be, for Cairncross, probably
his greatest ever friendship.
It wasn't, obviously,
for Greene.
But for Cairncross, he
was a mentor, a friend,
an academic referee,
somebody he went to
with advice on literary
matters and all-round support.
And they became friends.
Greene lent him
his house in Capri
when he got married
[? in ?] Ireland.
And so it was a
significant meeting.
The real problem began for
Cairncross, in some ways,
when the war was over
and the Cold War began,
because from his position--
and this is how it's presented
in his, as I said, heavily
edited autobiography,
which has errors with dates
as well as some emissions,
and some would say evasions, as
well as having some interesting
stuff which--
about his life and so on.
But the problem
was that between--
for about three years from
1945, he passed no documents
to the Soviets.
And he wanted to get out.
He saw himself as
what he called, later,
a spy for the duration,
when the Soviet
Union was a wartime ally.
And that was how he
perceived himself.
He was an ally against
fascism, and he
was prepared to work for them.
When the Cold War
started, that all changed.
I should also add
that, of course,
he was a spy during the
Nazi Soviet pact, which
gave him all kinds of issues.
And for a while,
wouldn't pass documents.
And toward the end
of it, he reluctantly
passed documents when he
thought the Soviets were going
to enter the war and so on.
So he was an--
had also gone through
that turmoil, if you like.
But the Cold War was
obviously very significant.
And why he managed to
get himself re-recruited,
or allowed the contact to
continue after three years,
is a bit of a mystery.
But I suppose the question is,
once you're in that situation
when the Cold War starts--
this is from his position--
there's a bit of a purge in
the civil service of people
who had communist links.
How was he to, as it
were, extricate himself
from that position?
We don't know the
seriousness of the documents
he passed at that time.
They obviously weren't as
significant as the ones
he passed earlier.
But he continued to
be a reluctant spy,
meeting Henry in parts of--
actually, meeting, by this
time, Yuri Modine, his last--
as we go into the
late '40s, early '50s,
his last controller.
He had five in all in parts
of the West London suburbs
around Ealing,
Gunnersbury, and so on.
He was also trying to
get out because he wanted
to start his literary career.
And so he was doing stuff for
the BBC, the French service,
the BBC at Bush House in
between his other work
and also his meeting
his Soviet controller.
He was contributing to programs
for the French service.
"On the Future the Civil
Service," I think, was one.
"On Why Scientists are Attracted
to Espionage" was another one
he was talking about
during this period.
He also contributed his
first writing in this period.
But things all caught up with
him in the aftermath of Burgess
and Maclean's
disappearance in 1951.
And because of
the document found
in Burgess's flat
in his handwriting,
he was called in for questioning
by the famous Jim Skardon,
the famous interrogator.
It was a bit of an
intellectual sparring match--
for Cairncross,
something that, in a way,
seemed to appeal to him.
And from all accounts, he
didn't give much away--
but was significant
enough for him to resign.
So he did not
confess at this time,
and his espionage
wasn't exposed.
But he gave what they regarded
as unsatisfactory answers.
He was in breach of the
Official Secrets Act.
It was the documents he passed.
And so he resigned
from the treasury.
He'd just got married,
at that point,
to a young German Jewish
woman who had been involved
in Refugee Council in the '30s.
She knew nothing of this affair.
His family knew nothing.
She wondered why, all of a
sudden, he'd given up this job.
And they were now
traveling on the car
the KGB had bought
for them through Paris
and through France and Italy.
I should add that, as an
absent-minded professor,
somebody who was a
very unlikely spy,
could not only not
operate a camera,
but when the KGB
bought him a car,
he managed to stall it
with his Soviet controller
in the passenger seat in one
of the thoroughfares in Ealing.
And a policeman
came over to him,
got in-- told him to get out,
got into the driving seat,
and took it over to the curb
with the Soviet controller,
Modin, in the passenger
seat with the documents.
But anyway, that's a--
he writes about this,
Modin, in his account of it.
But being a British Bobby, he
just carried on with his work,
and nothing happened.
Anyway, by now, they're
traveling through France.
He's looking,
applying for jobs--
academic jobs.
He doesn't have
enough publications.
He has Lord Hankey and Graham
Greene as his referees--
impressive.
But not enough publications.
And so eventually, they end up
in Rome with friends of Gabi--
that's his wife--
who'd been, also, in
the Italian antifascist
resistance, part of
the same Rosselli
liberal socialist group.
And he got a job
working at the UN.
Gabi became a translator.
I tracked down a lot of his
former colleagues and friends
who told me about
his life in Rome
and write about that
quite a lot in the book.
And just moving on, I think,
because of time, quite quickly,
he publishes books on Moliere.
He has a long
battle with the BBC
to take his
dramatizations of Racine.
Eventually, they do.
Radio 3 and Radio 4 take it
on board in the late '60s
and early '70s.
He has to explain to them
why he can't come back
for the rehearsals,
because at that point,
MI5 had not given him
permission to come back.
So he was making a
success as a scholar
and a writer in
a particular way.
And I suppose the peak
of his academic career
came in 1964, where he
was appointed as professor
of romance languages
at Western Reserve
University in Cleveland--
an interesting time
to go there, just
after Kennedy's assassination
at the beginning of the 1960s
and so on.
And a position of
some prestige for him.
He was slightly surprised
that the Americans let him in,
given that they talked,
obviously, to MI5.
And indeed, within days
of him taking up his post,
MI5 and FBI were
turning up at his hotel.
And he went through a
series of interrogations.
And this time, 1964, in
the early months of 1964,
he confessed.
It was just before
Blunt confessed,
just after Michael Straight,
the American communist who's
also recruited, confessed.
And it was a year after Kim
Philby was known to be a spy.
Anybody who's just
watched the Profumo play
will also know that
in that period,
the British government
was obsessed,
and the British media, with
scandals and espionage.
And so it was an odd situation,
because MI5 couldn't actually
bring him back.
He'd admitted, confessed to FBI
on American soil, as it were.
And that was thought to be not
usable in evidence, in court.
So they were in a slight
dilemma of what to do with him.
And they couldn't extradite
him under those conditions.
And so, actually, for the
remainder of his life,
virtually, he was in
this strange position
where he was allowed
to come back to the UK
as long as he helped them
within their investigations.
And that included trying to get
his recruiter, James Klugmann,
to confess, and other things.
So he didn't have immunity,
like Anthony Blunt had.
Because when Blunt confessed,
the queen was told about it.
The prime minister
wasn't told about it,
although the prime
minister was told
about Cairncross's confession.
Lots of cabinet meetings
I describe in the book,
make that clear.
But Blunt was given
immunity as the surveyor
of the queen's pictures.
Cairncross wasn't given
that clear immunity.
It was another burning
resentment for him.
I mean, he resented
Blunt's academic success
and various other things.
And this was something else.
His life in Rome
prospered, really.
This was the first--
his confession didn't
become public at all.
His brother was
told, was shocked.
But his first public
exposure came in 1979,
when two "Sunday Times"
journalists turned up
at his doorstep.
Appeared on the front page
of the "Sunday Times."
They didn't get much out of him.
They slightly
misrepresented the heading.
He was also visited by
another "Sunday Times"
journalist, Marjorie Wallace,
who's quite exasperated by him.
She wanted to do a
feature on the fifth man,
but he wasn't co-operative.
They went out for dinner.
He took her on a bus tour
of Rome, at which point
she said, are you--
I have a story to write.
Were you or were you
not the fifth man?
And again, he's
being very academic,
and not answering,
and procrastinating,
and not wanting to this--
on the one hand and
on the other hand.
She didn't get the story.
She later wrote an
article, "The Spy Who
Nearly Loved Me" or something.
But she didn't get
the confession.
It wasn't until 1990, the
second public exposure,
that everything really came out,
where the Soviet defector Oleg
Gordievsky and Christopher
Andrew, the espionage expert,
published their
book inside the KGB
where he was named
as the fifth man.
Technically, the Soviets did
regard him as the fifth man.
He was questioning it.
A lot else in the
book, particularly
about his biography,
is inaccurate--
a lot of the things I've said
about his background wrongly
caricatured in the book.
Italy mellowed him.
Anybody who's lived in
Italy will understand that.
It mellows most people.
I lived in Italy for a while.
He became less
irascible, if you like.
And it suited him.
He spoke fluent Italian.
And the Italian life
appealed to him.
He would appear on Italian
TV talking about Moliere
and other writers and thinkers.
And he fitted in very well.
The people who knew him spoke
very highly of him as a friend
and as somebody
who enjoyed life.
He later returned.
I mean, he moved
to Paris late 1989,
around the time of
the Berlin Wall--
I think just before--
partly because he couldn't get
a extension on his Rome flat,
not for any major reason.
He then became exposed
as the fifth man
when he was in France.
He was all over the press.
He finally came
back to the UK just
before he died, lived in
Herefordshire for a while.
And obviously, on his
death, the debate continued.
This autobiography,
"The Enigma Spy,"
was published two years later.
I've cut quite a
long story short,
but look forward
to some questions.
Just to sum up, really--
how much time have we got?
How much time have I--
SPEAKER: About 10 minutes or so.
GEOFF ANDREWS: So just
a bit of summing up,
because it's important to set
out some quite significant
questions with Cairncross
that really don't--
I mean, one of the problems
with Cairncross is that he is--
because he's the fifth
member of this ring,
he's judged, in a sense, by
them and compared to them.
All the other four, obviously,
knew each other, were friends.
You've probably seen stories
of Burgess's friendship
with Philby.
The whole saga of Burgess
and Maclean being exposed
has been written about
very well recently.
Andrew [? Lonnie's ?]
biography of Burgess,
Ronan Phillips' biography of
Don Maclean, the last few years,
describe the pressures on
Burgess and Maclean as they--
in the run-up to
their disappearance.
And some of it's
quite entertaining
as well as being traumatic.
The other four also went through
various breakdowns and drinking
and so on.
Again, didn't really
apply to Cairncross.
So he wasn't really,
I think, fairly--
not been fairly judged in
relation to the others.
He wasn't a spy for the
duration, despite, I think,
his initial claims.
We can debate about why
he continued after 1945.
I raise the question of whether
self-preservation is a factor.
There's some disagreement
within the family.
Some, I think,
felt he should have
had-- shown a bit more
courage in coming forward
when he had the opportunity.
Others say, what could he have
done in those circumstances?
A lot of discussion about
whether the security service
messed up the whole thing.
He felt betrayed by MI5, because
he'd got this sort of deal
with them--
not immunity, but
a kind of deal.
And so when he was exposed,
he was, as he put it,
thrown to the wolves
of all the press.
Unwisely, he took part
in a "BBC Newsnight"
interview at the
time of his exposure
as the fifth man in 1990.
You can find this,
actually, on Google.
It's probably one of
the worst interviews
anybody could do in the history
of British broadcasting.
But he comes across
as an academic--
taking issue with
the question, umming
and ahhing a bit over
whether he was this
and whether he was
that-- although you
do see a bit of passion when
they go onto appeasement
and he says, and Chamberlain
was the one who betrayed us.
He led us down the garden path,
and all that kind of thing.
It was probably an
unwise interview,
because I think
they'd expected to be
able to make a statement
about his condition.
Of course, if you agree
to a BBC interview,
they're not necessarily going
to operate on that line.
But I think it's important
to know his story, partly
to understand the context,
historical context of the time.
A letter he sent to
one of his friends
passed onto me during the
course of writing the book
said words to the
effect of, if there
had been a Churchillian
party in the 1930s,
I would only be remembered,
if at all, for my Racine--
his translations of Racine,
regarded as some of the best.
And so his position,
he thought, was
very much in line with the
Churchill view on appeasement.
Obviously, his reaction
to that was an example
of his single mindedness.
Some would say naivete,
others would use other words--
but the way he dealt with that.
But it's quite interesting.
And so it's unfair
to see him, really,
as a threat to Western
civilization-- which,
of course, is what a lot of the
other members of the Cambridge
Spies are represented.
Of course, they went
to Moscow, and some
were very loyal to Moscow.
He went to Italy.
He was somebody who was deeply
embedded in Western culture
intellectually, culturally,
and emotionally.
So he was not somebody
one could imagine
wanting to bring it down.
And there is an interview
between Stella Rimington,
who was the last MI5
person to interrogate him--
I think that's fair
to say-- in the '70s.
There's a [INAUDIBLE] interview
between Stella Rimington
and Frances
Cairncross, his niece,
where this question comes
up, where Frances is critical
of his--
her uncle's decision to
carry on after 1945, but also
rejects the assumption that
his espionage is somehow
to be equated with more
recent examples of espionage,
where spies have tried to bring
down Western civilization.
So, anyway, I leave
that for your questions.
And obviously, do read the book.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thanks.
That was really interesting.
I don't know a lot
about this, so I
was very interested in
hearing about the initial way
that the five men were
recruited during the '30s.
And it seems like
all of them went on
to have what you'd
call successful careers
in different ways, and therefore
be of value to the Soviets.
How many other
people would there
have been that were recruited
as students in Cambridge
at the time and would
be part of this story,
maybe, had they gone on to
be in positions to share
more information and to be
of more value to the Soviets?
GEOFF ANDREWS: That's
a very good question,
because there were lots of
others who were recruited.
And again, when Cairncross was
being called the fifth man,
he pointed some of the others--
Leo Long, for example.
I'm pausing to whether
I should mention
Goronwy Rees, because
there's a lot of controversy
over whether he was
and what he did.
But there were certainly
others who were recruited.
Michael Straight, for
example, the American
who was manipulated by
Blunt and may well be--
The other leading communist,
in addition to James Klugmann,
was John Cornford, who was quite
a hero for that generation.
He died in Spain.
And Michael Straight was
very close to Cornford.
And in the aftermath of
his death, early 1937--
late '36, early '37--
Blunt played on this
emotional weakness of Straight
and recruited him on that basis.
It was thought that
Cairncross was also
subject to similar blackmail.
He wasn't.
I think the order of
the Cambridge five
is because of their use--
their importance, I suppose.
That's why they're
classified in such a way.
The other four were friends.
There were nobody else,
really, in that group.
There are lots of people who
were suspected of being spies.
The other thing I would say is
that I've previously written
a history of the
British Communist Party,
and a lot of people in
Britain, ordinary communists--
it's difficult to understand
that by today's standards--
thought that giving
information to the Soviets
was generally a good
thing, because they
believed in the red
paradise or whatever.
They thought it was their--
certainly before the Soviet
show trials became known--
some remained in denial
of them after it,
but obviously, before
they became known--
but of course, it was the
quality of the information.
So it's partly about
what roles they
had in the security service.
So someone can want
to be a spy, but what
information have
they got access to,
really, decides
their importance.
It's also, I think, again, that
thinking about the Soviet Union
as an ally is quite
difficult, having
been through the Cold War.
The popularity of Uncle
Joe and so on, if--
not only among communists.
People would find
that distasteful,
a lot of it, by what we
know about the regime.
But certainly, the idea of
aligning with the Soviets
meant, arguably,
a different thing
then to many people
than it would do now.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
