Agent Moliere: The Life of John Caincross | Geoff Andrews | Talks at Google

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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]
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Channel: Talks at Google
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Length: 54min 53sec (3293 seconds)
Published: Thu Mar 05 2020
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