Too Secret Too Long, page 52
Not until 1966, after a further general election and after Hollis’s retirement, did MI5 acquaint Harold Wilson and his Home Secretary about the Blunt affair. As will be seen, the investigation into Hollis himself was under way at that time, and perhaps the possibility that he too might have to be offered immunity in the foreseeable future helped to induce the new MI5 management to inform the Labour Government about the ‘highly productive precedent’ set by the Blunt and Long cases.
The Potential Value of Oversight
When James Callaghan learned of Blunt’s treachery during his Prime Ministership he was appalled that such a man should have been allowed to continue in freedom and respect, though he had been fully briefed on the beneficial results of the immunity claimed by MI5.[14] My inquiries have shown that a similar view is held by many other politicians and public figures who have the interests of the secret services at heart. The circumstances show that because of the virtually indisputable authority of the Director-General of MI5 prevailing in 1964 on security issues, Hollis was able to overbear the Attorney-General, the Director of Public Prosecutions and his deputy, and Palace officials to agree to a course of action which, to many, seems reprehensible, in spite of gallant efforts by Mrs Thatcher to excuse them. It would seem, therefore, that the Blunt case is another excellent example of a serious security issue on which the advice and judgement of a panel of experienced Parliamentarians or Privy Councillors would have been valuable in countering the weight of Hollis’s ex officio authority and in contributing sounder judgement than was available in a man of Hollis’s limited capabilities.
Callaghan was not informed of the Long case. Had he been he would probably have been even more incensed, for in the Long case Hollis was effectively dispensing justice without reference to any of the Law Officers. This power in the hands of the Director-General of MI5 to award effective immunity by offering inducements continued until the public exposure of Long in November 1981. On learning about it, Mrs Thatcher took steps to end it, though with careful avoidance of any criticism of Hollis for having wielded it. Inducements may now no longer be offered without reference to the Attorney-General.[15] It would seem to be fair to deduce that had MI5 been subject to oversight and accountability in 1964 the pernicious practices applied to both Long and Blunt would have been ended then. It can rightly be argued that law enforcement is not the prime purpose of the secret services, but the cases of Blunt, Long, Philby and others show that, while the law has been enforced for what might be termed second-class spies, there has been a blatant reluctance to apply it to traitors who have been connected with the secret services. MI5 has also been having its cake and eating it in another respect when circumstances suited. While insisting that law enforcement is not its prime purpose, it has taken a legal attitude to the admissibility of evidence when this has suited its management. In fact, what is inadmissible in court is often perfectly admissible in an espionage inquiry.
chapter forty
Big Fish Escapes as Small Fry
When MI5 officers searched Burgess’s flat following his disappearance in May 1951 they found some handwritten notes concerning affairs in the Treasury. There were also pen-portraits of various officials, some giving details of alleged character weaknesses and other features which might be exploited, indicating that they had been written by a pro-Soviet talent scout. Sir John Colville, who later became secretary to Winston Churchill, has told me that he was one of twenty-five people mentioned.
The papers, which dated from the early 1940s, were unsigned and their author might never have been discovered but for a fluke occurrence. They had been passed to Arthur Martin who happened to have a sharp-eyed secretary. She recognized the handwriting as that of a Treasury official called John Cairncross. A check of his record showed that he had been at Cambridge at the same time as Burgess, Maclean, Klugmann and others and that, like them, he had been an overt communist. This was regarded as understandable as he had been a scholarship boy from a poor home in Glasgow.
Cairncross was placed under letter and telephone check and this revealed that he was being urgently summoned to an emergency meeting with a K.G.B. officer in a wood in Surrey in connection with the Burgess and Maclean defections. He was already under surveillance and a most careful trap was set up in the wood. Cairncross duly attended but the Russian never appeared. Nor did later surveillance ever catch Cairncross in touch with his controller suggesting that, once again, Soviet Intelligence had been given a warning which could only have originated inside MI5.
When it became clear that surveillance was producing no result Cairncross was interviewed by Martin in 1952. He quickly admitted that he had written the notes which had contained information of value to the Russians in 1940, when they had been virtual allies of the Nazis, though it had not been highly classified. He denied being a spy or any kind of Soviet agent and said that he did not believe that Burgess was a Soviet agent either. His offer of resignation was accepted and he soon obtained a post abroad, first in Canada, then in America, finally joining the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome in about 1958.[1] The reason for his departure from Whitehall was not revealed and no further interest was taken in his case.
The way in which Cairncross was dismissed as ‘small fry’ in 1952 is a dreadful indictment of MI5’s handling of the case and this is a view not conditioned by hindsight. His insistence that he had not known that Burgess was a Soviet agent was accepted far too readily. His assignation with the known K.G.B. officer was proof of his K.G.B. connection and fair evidence of Burgess’s. The MI5 management was probably only too pleased to hear him deny Burgess’s guilt but its dismissal of the case against Cairncross at that stage failed to expose a much more serious act of treason. Cairncross’s full service record was easily available and, had it been properly examined, loud alarm bells should have sounded. In 1942 he had used his fluency in German to get himself on to the staff of the most secret and most sensitive of all establishments, the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, where he worked as an editor dealing with Air Intelligence.[2] In 1944 he had moved to the headquarters of MI6 itself.[3] So, either it did not occur to MI5 that he might have continued his activities on behalf of the K.G.B. in both establishments or the managements of MI5 and MI6, which had run Bletchley, were so embarrassed by the discovery of a potential agent there that they simply wanted to be rid of the Cairncross case and ensured its total suppression. His departure abroad meant that he could not be prosecuted as extradition is not possible under the Official Secrets Act.
During Blunt’s long but spasmodic interrogation he continued to protect his high-level friends whom he admired but, being an arch snob, had no compunction about naming associate spies of humble origin whom he disliked, especially when he knew that they were no longer of any value to the K.G.B. Among the first he named was Cairncross, admitting that he had reported him to his Soviet controller as a potential spy while teaching him at Cambridge and that the next stage in the recruitment had been achieved by the other communist Cambridge contemporary, James Klugmann. MI5 had no option but to take some action and in 1964 Martin travelled to Rome to interrogate Cairncross who could, of course, have simply refused to be interviewed.
When told about Blunt’s admissions, Cairncross, knowing that he was beyond the reach of the law, a legal fact which Martin may have confirmed to him, made what MI5 considered to be a full and contrite confession. He claimed that he had embraced Soviet-style communism as the only way of securing social justice. He confirmed that it had been Klugmann who had introduced him to his first Soviet controller, the ubiquitous ‘Otto’, during a visit to Regent’s Park, where the K.G.B. man was waiting for them. ‘Otto’ had instructed him to reject his open communism, go ‘underground’ and get into the Foreign Office instead of pursuing an academic career, as he would have preferred. Cairncross officially quit the Communist Party late in 1936 and competed for entry to the Foreign Office, passing top of his list. For two years he worked in the German Department, where Maclean was a colleague.
Cairncross explained that after ‘Otto’ had been recalled in the 1938 purge he gave his material to Burgess, which was how some of it came to be in the defector’s flat. Burgess, whom he knew to be a Comintern agent, had passed most of it to Philby’s estranged wife Lizi who was working in London as a full-time Soviet courier, also servicing Maclean and others.
Before ‘Otto’ left Britain he suggested that Cairncross should apply for transfer to the Treasury, presumably because Maclean was already giving the K.G.B. sufficient coverage in the German Department. Cairncross was successful, demonstrating again the extraordinary facility with which the K.G.B. was able to recruit unknown people with uncertain futures and intrude them into secret departments of its choice. From the Treasury the K.G.B. was able to move Cairncross to a position of far greater potential.
From Philby, and probably from Long and Blunt too, the K.G.B. already knew that Bletchley was breaking the German Enigmamachine codes by the ingenious processes known by the code-name ‘Ultra’. Cairncross described how, having managed to get himself on to the Bletchley staff on Soviet instructions, he had copied secret documents and took them to London at weekends to give them to his new controller, ‘Henry’ (Anatoli Gorski). He said that to facilitate this service the Russians had given him money to buy a cheap car and run it. The traitor took some pride in recalling that he had received special commendation from Moscow for one particular batch of documents which contained details of Luftwaffe dispositions before the crucial battle of Kursk, in which the Germans were defeated. He described another endeavour which, he said, had enabled the Russians to destroy hundreds of German aircraft on the ground.
While trying to claim extenuating circumstances on the grounds that the Soviet Union was an ally, Cairncross admitted that he had spied for the K.G.B. against the interests of his own country while Stalin was assisting Hitler to defeat France.
As Martin listened to this monstrous recital of treason in war, a capital offence then, he must have realized how ineptly the case had been handled in 1952. The information that Britain was breaking the German codes could easily have leaked from the Russians to Germany, especially as it has been established that the K.G.B. was in close touch with senior German Intelligence officers who were taking out personal insurance against the possibility of a Nazi defeat.
After the war Sir Winston Churchill praised the staff at Bletchley as ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled’.[4] Cairncross had cackled directly to the Russians during two crucial years, as had others.
When Cairncross switched to the headquarters of MI6 in 1944, a move facilitated by the fact that Bletchley was run by that department, he worked first in German counter-intelligence and then moved to Yugoslav affairs. He was in the section run by David Footman, who remembered him as ‘an odd person with a chip on his shoulder’.[5] One of Cairncross’s most important field officers was the man who had recruited him, James Klugmann, then a major based in the Italian port of Bari. Between them they provided the K.G.B. with a continuous reading of Allied plans concerning Yugoslavia, and Klugmann helped to change them in Moscow’s interests.
Through his linguistic ability Klugmann had insinuated himself into Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) and had been on the staff of the Balkans Division based in Cairo. His open membership of the Communist Party was known but because he spoke Serbo-Croat and was a skilled wireless operator his desk dealt with all radio messages between Cairo and the British and American officers attached to the partisan forces of General Mihailovich fighting the Germans in the mountains of Yugoslavia. Both in Cairo and later in Bari, Klugmann did all he could to induce S.O.E. headquarters in London to dump Mihailovich, who was anti-communist, and switch all support to Tito, a partisan leader who wanted a communist Yugoslavia after the war. He saw to it that pleas for food, weapons and other supplies from Mihailovich’s forces were suppressed or, if any action was taken, that the supplies were diverted to Tito. News of Mihailovich’s successes were withheld from the B.B.C., which reserved its propaganda for Tito.[6] Klugmann even manufactured a false signal purporting to have originated from General Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, to Churchill stating that the former diplomat Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean was unsuitable for an assignment in Yugoslavia.[7] Wilson never sent such a message. The Russians feared that Brigadier Maclean would encourage Tito to break with Stalin and become independent – as he did, though Klugmann, and Cairncross who assisted him, tried hard to prevent it.
Cairncross remained in MI6 until the end of the war and then returned to the Treasury where he had access to high policy documents and assessments of the U.K. economy which, he admitted to Martin, he continued to pass to the Russians. After the war he continued to meet his Soviet controller about once a month and he confirmed that immediately after the defection of Maclean and Burgess he had been called to an emergency meeting in a wood in Surrey which the Russians failed to attend. That was the meeting of which MI5 had secured advance warning. Cairncross assured Martin that the K.G.B. lost interest in him once he left Britain in 1952, a move with which the Russians had agreed in the belief that MI5 was bound to dig into his wartime activities at Bletchley and in MI6 headquarters which, in fact, it failed to do.
All this was duly reported to Hollis who is remembered as having taken little personal interest in the case.[8] So long as Cairncross remained abroad Hollis could avoid taking action and he did not inform any ministers about the confession and all that it implied concerning wartime security in MI6 and Bletchley in particular.
Cairncross’s evidence about Klugmann’s part in his recruitment could not be ignored, however, for it was the first hard information about that traitor’s treachery. Klugmann was openly pursuing his ardent support of Soviet communism in Britain, so when Martin and others urged that Cairncross should be used to try to break Klugmann Hollis was in no position to raise objections, had he wanted to do so. There was urgent need to discover any others whom Klugmann, who operated at Oxford as well as Cambridge, might have recruited, and it transpired that these included Bernard Floud, the Labour M.P., and his brother Peter, and a man who had become an important civil servant.
Cairncross was told that he could return to Britain for a limited period without fear of arrest if he would agree to confront Klugmann – a dispensation to which Hollis agreed without securing the permission of either the Attorney-General or the Director of Public Prosecutions. It would have been routine practice for Hollis to have taken the advice of MI5’s in-house legal advisers and, if they interpreted the law as Sir Michael Havers was to do in 1981, Hollis would have been told that the offer to Cairncross could be construed as an inducement, which would prohibit future prosecution if he accepted it. Whether or not this was made clear to Cairncross remains secret.
Displaying some courage, Cairncross saw Klugmann and threatened to expose him, with inevitable damage to the Communist Party, unless he too agreed to co-operate with MI5. Klugmann angrily and contemptuously rejected the offer and, because he resolutely refused to be interviewed by anyone from MI5, Cairncross’s effort came to nothing. No attempt was made to induce Cairncross to accuse Klugmann publicly for that would have exposed MI5’s deal with him, a proven spy, and, perhaps, the deal with Blunt. It would also have exposed MI5’s ineptitude in 1952.
Cairncross gave leads to several other Britons who had served the interests of the K.G.B., naming some of them as spies.[9] One of them, another communist who had served inside the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and other Whitehall departments of great interest to the K.G.B., had been openly communist at Cambridge. He received high honours and a lucrative capitalist directorship on his retirement in a company of particular interest to the K.G.B. Another, also recruited at Cambridge, was a highly placed civil servant when Cairncross exposed him and continued his career until normal retirement on full pension, though some effort was made to restrict his access to secrets. Both men simply refused to be interviewed by MI5 and nothing could be done about them. From information supplied by Cairncross MI5 was also able to secure the removal of two highly suspect people from G.C.H.Q.
The only substantial result of Cairncross’s visit to Britain, therefore, was to make him immune to prosecution, though he was given to understand that he could be prosecuted if he returned after going back to Rome and may have believed this. He preferred to live in Italy and this suited the MI5 management who did not want him loose in Britain, knowing as much as he did about Blunt. He remains there and in 1981 was sent to prison, briefly, for a currency smuggling offence.[10]
Owing to the tight security formerly obtaining in MI5 there was no publicity whatever about Cairncross’s treachery until after Blunt’s public exposure in 1979 when some information about his interogation and statement in 1952 became known. On this evidence Cairncross was, understandably, dismissed as ‘small fry’ by the media and that remained the common view until the full story of his activities, given to me from MI5 sources, was published in March 1981. Those newspapers that had previously dismissed him as unimportant ignored the evidence, as did Parliament. It would have been reasonable to think, at least, that the myth that Bletchley had never been penetrated would no longer be allowed to persist, but little has been made of Cairncross’s treachery there, probably because reputations are at stake.
Until the publication of Their Trade is Treachery, Cairncross continued to deny that he had ever been a spy. He has not done so since: he simply points out that he has never admitted having been a spy.
Was Cairncross the Fifth Man of the original Ring of Five mentioned by the defector Golitsin? He was certainly controlled by ‘Otto’ and ‘Henry’, who were assigned to the Ring of Five, but the original five were friends who were all known to each other as spies. Cairncross could never be described as having been a friend of the other four, a fact underscored by Blunt’s readiness to expose him. MI5 officers who have studied the Ring believe that the fifth member was someone who was more in the social style of the other four and was, in fact, a member of The Apostles.
