The Enigma Spy: An Autobiography

Abstract

London: Century, 1997, xix, 203 pp, $34.95John Cairncross, KGB codename 'The Carelian,' was the last but by no means the least of the ring of Soviet spies recruited in the 1930s at Cambridge University. Set against the likes of Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, he was not a flamboyant figure or a high-flyer. Nor was he a natural for the sub rosa world. To his KgB-handlers he was a pure nightmare -- an agent unable to remember the details of clandestine meetings, vague about time, nervous in the extreme, and technically all thumbs. He was incapable of operating the Minox camera bestowed upon him and managed to ruin this stout little device. Nor was he a success behind the wheel of the car that the KGB bought him -- he failed his driving test several times and on one notable occasion stalled the car in front of a London bobby, with his KGB handler in the passenger seat and a pile of stolen documents on the floor. The nice policeman helped Cairncross get his car restarted and explained to him the working of the carburetor choke.But lest Cairncross seem like something out of a British 'Carry on' film, it needs to be recalled that he was also a holder of one of the Soviet Union's highest honours (the Order of the Red Banner), a man of notable intellectual skills who managed to pass first in his year in the entrance exams to the British Civil Service, and a very lucky fellow. Although he fell under suspicion in 1951, after the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow, was interrogated by MI5, and let go from his post in the British government, he neither ended his days in Moscow nor did time in jail. Instead he led an agreeable life in Rome, Geneva, Bangkok, and Karachi, working for a variety of international organizations, before spending his sunset years in the south of France and, at the very end, managing a quiet return to his native England. Canadian readers might note with amusement that after his working career as a spy was ended he signed on with the CBC as a radio correspondent in Rome during the 1950s. Moliere specialists will recall him as a well-published expert on the French playwright. Those absorbed by polygamy will recall his enthusiastic book, After Polygamy was Made a Sin.Spurred into action by the publication of Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky's authoritative historical account, KGB: The Inside Story (1990) and by the appearance of an English translation of the memoirs of his one-time handler, Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (1994), Cairncross spent his last years in that most foolish of pursuits -- trying to deny the past. Both Andrew and Gordievsky and Modin had portrayed him as a serious spy, one of the most effective of the Cambridge Five. He provided the KGB with wartime intelligence on the atomic bomb and secrets from that holy of holies of British intelligence, the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. After the war, he passed on bucketloads of information on British defence policy, economic decision-making, and nato arrangements from his posts in the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence. …