The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  This was a surprise, because he had never given me the impression of being politically inclined. I handed back my CPGB card in January 1935, my brief flirtation having ended in disillusionment.

  After graduating, we went our separate ways. It was probably in December 1942, whilst on a liaison visit from Cairo to BP, that I bumped into him in the passage of Hut 3, having not seen or heard of him since 1936. He was dressed as an Army Staff Captain…he stayed at BP until the summer of 1943, when he transferred to a post in MI6.

  Our next and last contact was when he invited me to lunch at the Travellers Club in February 1949, when he was back in the Treasury. In the middle of the meal he disconcertingly asked: “Are we still reading Russian ciphers?” I had no firsthand knowledge of any current work on Russian, though I did know that on June 22, 1941 what work there was had been dropped, and the only off-putting response I could think of, on the spur of the moment, was to shake my head and mutter “One time.” He did not pursue this.2

  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 jeopardized 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 favorable 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 toward the eventual defeat of Germany; that even though Cairncross’s actions were dangerous, with potentially horrifying consequences, they did, however obliquely, help toward 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 non-aggression 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 onward, 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 ac
hieved 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 wads 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:

  … there was no problem about obtaining the German decrypts for they were left around on the floor after having been processed. I also added to these the collections of my translations into English, since they expanded the coverage. I concealed the documents in my trousers in order to pass them out of the grounds, where I was never subjected to a check. I then transferred them into my bag at the nearby railway station.

  After that, they were handed to Henry [his codenamed Soviet handler] in an envelope at some spot in the suburbs of west London. I would meet him at the entrance to the Tube station, follow him to the platform and get out of the train when he got off. I would then trail him to a quiet spot, where the envelope was handed over.3

  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 minimized 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.

  Yet, despite the earlier Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the fact remains that from 1941 to the end of the war, the Russians were, for cold-heartedly 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 program. 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 behavior would be immediately spotted by colleagues, and reported. During the war years, civilians would regularly report the suspicious behavior 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 harbor 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 points out, neither Kim Philby nor Guy Burgess had any access to Bletchley documentation; nevertheless, that even such a conversation could be held is a stark illustration of how fortunate it was that the Bletchley secret was never disclosed.

  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 inquiries 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 scrutinized.

  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 her 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.”