The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (31 page)

Cairncross joined the Foreign Office in 1936. Around that time, Klugman arranged to meet him in Regent’s Park in London, seemingly for purely social reasons. But as soon as Cairncross arrived at the rendezvous, he wrote in a memoir, a round, moon-faced man appeared from behind a tree and introduced himself as ‘Otto’. He was KGB. Klugman made his excuses and left ‘Otto’ and Cairncross to it. ‘Otto’ wanted Cairncross to work for the Russians.

In his memoir, Cairncross professed to have been acting out of a burning zeal to see Nazism defeated; the best means for this to be achieved was by co-operation with Soviet Russia. But in this account, he also suggests extra motivations, including blackmail (fear of losing his Foreign Office position) and money (the need
to live at a smarter address and not in a dowdy west London suburb). The Molotov/Ribbentrop pact of 1939 made his life distinctly uncomfortable.

During the war, Cairncross became private secretary to Lord Hankey, who had a general supervisory role over the intelligence services. In this capacity, between 1940 and 1942, Cairncross would have had direct access to the decrypts coming from Bletchley Park. After a brief spell of army training, Cairncross came to Bletchley itself in 1942, as a captain, and joined Hut 3. A Bletchley Park cryptographer called Henry Dryden recalled Cairncross in a postscript he wrote of an account of his own time at the Park:

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; the Prime Minister’s suspicions had been pricked both from diplomatic channels and from Bletchley Park decrypts. And without any cynicism, a German offensive on Russia would inevitably be good news for Britain; while all those divisions were tied up in the East, an invasion of the United Kingdom would be extremely unlikely, if not impossible. But it seems that Churchill was at odds with some Whitehall and Intelligence figures, who persisted in taking the more pessimistic line that Hitler’s priority was the subjugation of Britain. Indeed, Hitler himself continued to give signs that this was his foremost intention.

As 1941 wore on, it became increasingly obvious thanks to the messages being deciphered by Bletchley that the Germans would indeed be launching an assault on Russia. It was the belief of many in Intelligence that if this was the case, then the Russians would capitulate very fast, possibly within weeks, which would then leave Hitler free to turn his attentions back to Britain.

So how could Russia be warned without the source of British information being compromised? In April, the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, was deputed to send a warning to Stalin that such an attack was looming. Stalin’s initial reaction was that Hitler was bluffing. However, Russian defence was stepped up. And from the day of the German invasion onwards, Churchill, though anti-Bolshevik to his core, ordered that Russia be helped in various ways.

At the end of June 1941, when Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union, with the result that Russia was fighting on multiple fronts (as well as Germany, it was also in conflict with Finland, Romania and Albania), Bletchley Park managed to break the ‘Vulture’ Enigma key; this was the key that concerned German military orders being given on the Eastern Front. The very next day, Churchill ordered that Stalin should be vouchsafed this intelligence, as long as its source was obfuscated. The job of passing it on was given to Cecil Barclay, who worked in British Military Intelligence and was based in the British Embassy in Moscow.

The Russians were extremely slow to show any gratitude for the nuggets of intelligence passed their way through such tortuous routes. Indeed, they greeted with disbelief and suspicion the news, deduced from Bletchley Park, that the Germans had penetrated the Russian cipher system: they took that to mean that their ciphers had been broken by the British.

So how much information did Churchill spoon-feed to the Soviets? There has been recent speculation about the Russian ‘Lucy’ spy network in Switzerland, which passed back extremely high-quality intelligence to Moscow; so good, in fact, that it was believed
to have emanated within German High Command. The speculation has been that much of ‘Lucy’s’ top information was gleaned from Bletchley Park, and that Churchill covertly chose to use the ‘Lucy’ route in order to pass vital knowledge to Stalin. But Bletchley’s official history states baldly that there was no truth in this.

Later, in 1943, the Bletchley decoders broke a German key which they called ‘Porcupine’. For a few weeks, they were able to intercept all German air force messages, particularly those relating to movements and operations in southern Russia. The passing of information was carried out with the greatest of care – sometimes, as before through the British Embassy in Moscow – in order to jealously protect the source of the information.

And how much did the Russians really know or understand about Britain’s system of codebreaking? One would immediately think that the Cairncross handover of decrypts must have provided a fairly strong indication. As the war progressed, the Russians certainly learned of the existence of Bletchley Park, which they referred to as ‘Krurort’. According to Miranda Carter’s biography of Anthony Blunt, he also handed over Bletchley decrypts to his Soviet controller. If this is the case, then it does seem remarkable that the Russians never worked it out. However, according to Peter Calvocoressi, Russian intelligence never grasped the scale, or indeed the method, of what had been achieved at the Park.

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:

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 social disgrace that was brought down upon him by his 1979 exposure as a Soviet mole. Many will argue ferociously that his treachery led to the deaths of many valued British agents. And the notion that in the 1930s, when he was swayed by Communism, little or nothing was known of the pathologically murderous nature of Stalin’s regime, seems thin.