A Soviet Spy Was Working at Bletchley Park During WW2 - And Passing Information to Moscow

We've covered quite a few German spies working in Britain during the Second World War, but did you know there were British people spying for the Soviet Union as well? Let's find out about John Cairncross, who actually worked at Bletchley Park.

He was born in Lesmahagow in Scotland, on the 25th of July 1913. He was good at languages and went on to study at Glasgow and Cambridge before joining the Foreign Office in 1936. It was around this time that he was recruited by Soviet intelligence, although his employers knew nothing about it.

In 1940, he became private secretary to Sir Maurice Hankey, who was involved in Britain's early atomic research. This gave John access to government papers, some of which contained information the Soviets were particularly interested in.

Then, in May 1942, he was transferred to Bletchley Park, home of the codebreakers. There he worked in Hut 3, where German military messages were translated and examined after being deciphered. Some of the information concerned German operations against Soviet forces, and John was secretly passing details to Soviet intelligence.

Britain and the Soviet Union were actually allies by then. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, bringing the two countries together. However, there was still a great deal of mistrust between them, and Britain wasn't prepared to hand over all its intelligence to Stalin.

John remained at Bletchley Park until June 1943, when he joined MI6. He returned to the Treasury in 1945 and carried on with his government career.

In 1951, MI5 began questioning him after his name appeared in the diary of Donald Maclean, another Soviet spy. The following year, investigators identified a handwritten report found among Guy Burgess's possessions as John's work. He admitted writing it but denied being a Soviet spy. He left government service in April 1952.

He did eventually admit to working for Soviet intelligence during an interview with an MI5 officer in America on the 16th of February 1964. Even though he confessed, he was never prosecuted, and the full extent of his activities remained largely unknown to the public for years.

In 1990, he was publicly identified as the fifth member of the Cambridge spy ring. John died on the 8th of October 1995, aged 82.

The interesting thing about Cairncross is that he was passing information to a country that Britain was fighting alongside. Some of that information concerned German forces fighting the Soviets, so it could help them defeat a common enemy.

But Britain had never agreed to share those secrets, and Cairncross had taken it upon himself to do so.

Image info:

Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. Photograph by Matt Crypto, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.