Agent Molière
Geoff Andrews
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Years ago, Willy Russell wrote a musical called John, Paul, George, Ringo…. & Bert.
Among the five Cambridge spies, John Cairncross is very much the ‘& Bert’ figure. There have been books, articles, films and plays galore about Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt, but nobody seems to know or care about the ‘Fifth Man’, John Cairncross.
In books about the other spies, Cairncross is mentioned only in passing. For instance, in Ben Macintyre’s recent biography of Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends, he appears just twice.
After being discovered as a spy in 1964, John Cairncorss spent the rest of his life in exile, where he survived by writing translations of Molière and Racine, cantankerous to the end
Why is Cairncross sidelined in this way? One or two reasons suggest themselves. The other four spies were all public school boys and, outwardly at least, part of the Establishment. But Cairncross came from a fairly humble background in a small town in Lanarkshire: his father inherited the family ironmonger business, and his mother was a schoolteacher. This may have made him a less magnetic character for writers about espionage, who tend to be fascinated by the twin notions of class treachery and Establishment cover-ups.
Also, Cairncross wasn’t part of any circle: whereas the four others knew each other, he was an outsider, and, during his time as a spy, had no idea that the others were spies, too.
Unlike Burgess and Blunt’s, his sex life was heterosexual and nondescript; unlike Philby and Maclean, he had no family, so his treachery lacked a domestic dimension.
Cairncross’s story lacked drama, too. Philby, Burgess and Maclean made dramatic escapes to Moscow, where they lived out the rest of their days in varying states of depression. Sir Anthony Blunt was permitted to remain in Britain, living the life of an Establishment aesthete, until he was unmasked by the press in 1979, at which point he became an object of scorn. John Cairncross, on the other hand, lived in a sort of self-imposed exile on the Continent, eking out an existence as a jobbing writer and translator. When he was finally unmasked as the Fifth Man, nobody really seemed to care.
Geoff Andrews, a lecturer at the Open University, has set out to remedy this. Like all biographers of spies, he is determined to big up his man’s importance. ‘It is clear that John Cairncross was a very significant spy for the Soviets and generally held in high regard by Moscow Centre,’ he writes.
Andrews also thinks that Cairncross has been misunderstood: unlike the others, he was, he maintains, much more of an anti-fascist than a Communist. Does this make his treachery more forgivable?
Cairncross was born in 1913. His family was not quite so down-at-heel as has sometimes been suggested: five of his siblings went to university, and two of his brothers became university professors. His parents were wealthy enough to employ a maid (though she had to sleep in the kitchen), and were able and willing to finance John’s six years in higher education, first at Glasgow University, then at the Sorbonne, and then at Cambridge.
His fellow spy, the impossibly louche Guy Burgess, told their shared Soviet handler that Cairncross ‘speaks with a strong Scottish accent and cannot be called a gentleman’, though he was scarcely one to talk.
Rather, Cairncross’s key failing, both as a human being and as the subject for a biography, was more that he was a bit of a bore. Even his Soviet recruiting officer seemed to be suppressing a yawn when he reported back to Moscow: ‘He is pedantic, industrious, zealous and thrifty’ – none of them qualities that make for gripping reading.
Perhaps the high point of his life was when he came top in both the Foreign Office and Civil Service exams. He was then fast-tracked to a position in the American Department, but, within a few months, he was rubbing his colleagues up the wrong way. There seems to have been something very irritating about him. ‘As his career progressed, reports suggested that he lacked some of the administrative skills, the diplomatic manners and the necessary conformity to procedure,’ writes Andrews. ‘… he was not deemed “clubbable”… He was outspoken and opinionated… he found it increasingly difficult to fit in.’
In another book about spies, Enemies Within Richard Davenport-Hines – a much finer writer than Andrews – is much more damning. ‘His dissident nature was both political and personal: he had an inner pride which needed praise and craved status, but his prickly, conceited and resentful temperament discouraged people from giving him what he wanted. He was proud of the powerful analytical orderliness of his mind, but got into scrapes, had a reputation for untidiness and disorganisation and made himself unpopular.’
Cairncross wasn’t even very popular with the Russians, who proved increasingly irritated by his stubborn refusal to work out how to operate the camera they gave him. Instead, he insisted on smuggling huge piles of secret papers out of the office, and thus running a much greater risk of getting caught.
After a year in the Foreign Office, he was deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ and sent to the Treasury. He then worked as a private secretary to Lord Hankey, a senior government adviser. In 1941 alone, Cairncross passed 3,449 secret documents to the Soviets, including the War Cabinet minutes, intelligence reports, counter-intelligence reports, and the reports of the chiefs of staff.
From 1942, he was employed at Bletchley Park for ten months as a translator. He smuggled out so many decrypts – including details of German advances along the Eastern Front – that the Soviets awarded him the Order of the Red Banner. Sadly, this book offers little sense of the jeopardy or drama of spying, because there is so little information to hand. ‘Few Bletchley Park contemporaries remembered his short stay,’ writes Andrews. Such is the fate of biographers, always fenced in by available facts. The recent film The Imitation Game tried to jazz things up by portraying Cairncross as a double agent working for MI5, and even having him blackmailing poor old Alan Turing. But, as so often with films ‘based on true events’, this is a load of tosh.
Cairncross always claimed his motive for spying was purely to combat fascism, yet he continued to pass documents to Moscow long after fascism had been defeated. He was rumbled in 1964, but the government felt it expedient not to prosecute him: he spent the rest of his life in exile, where he survived by writing translations of Molière and Racine, cantankerous to the end. Sadly, though Andrews writes of Cairncross’s ‘arguments with the BBC drama department’ and ‘endless tussles with publishers and editors and… rivalry with other Molièrists’, he provides few details. His book – printed in the kind of small, pinched type more usually employed in foreign ferry timetables – is also strangely colourless.
Cairncross always claimed his motive for spying was purely to combat fascism, yet he continued to pass documents to Moscow long after fascism had been defeated
What of Cairncross’s private life? He ended up living with an American opera singer, 40 years his junior, but her attraction for this crotchety misanthrope is never explained. We are also told that ‘Cairncross’s friendship with Graham Greene was the most important of his life’, but their relationship seems to have been one-sided: over the course of three long volumes, Greene’s biographer, Norman Sherry, barely mentions Cairncross. Nor does he rate an entry in Graham Greene’s letters. The novelist Shirley Hazzard wrote a book about Graham Greene in Italy, but says only that Cairncross was ‘seen sporadically’.
Andrews himself admits that Cairncross’s ‘long, often rambling’ letters elicited ‘shorter replies from Greene, whose wide circles put more demands on his time’. All the signs suggest Greene was far more important in Cairncross’s life than Cairncross was in Greene’s.
Contrary to popular belief, being a spy does not necessarily make you enigmatic, or even interesting. When Cairncross published a book, Graham Greene dutifully wrote him a letter saying that he was ‘amazed at the amount of research you must have done and how you found time for it’. This is, alas, the sort of thing people say to writers when they can’t think of anything else.