John Cairncross

John Cairncross (born July 25, 1913 in Lesmahagow , South Lanarkshire , Scotland , † October 8, 1995 in Herefordshire , England ) was a British secret agent during World War II who, along with four others who came to be known as the Cambridge Five , spied for the Soviet Union .

Life

Cairncross was educated at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College (Cambridge) , where he studied modern languages ​​while getting to know the rest of the Cambridge Five. After graduating, he worked for the Foreign Office . In 1937 he joined the Communist Party .

The mansion (Engl .: The mansion ) of Bletchley Park (2002) was the headquarters of the British code breaker and is now a museum

In 1942 he worked as an employee of MI6 as a code breaker in the English Bletchley Park on the deciphering of secret message traffic, which the German Wehrmacht , with its rotor cipher machine Enigma encrypted . During this time he forwarded the deciphered information, which was given the code name Ultra in Bletchley Park , via secret channels to his contact points in the Soviet Union. The information provided was extremely helpful for the Red Army in winning the war against the German Reich on the German Eastern Front . For example, the information that Cairncross gave to the Soviets - it was the deciphered Enigma radio messages in the German original language - had a critical influence on, for example, the tank battle near Kursk , which the German side referred to as " Enterprise Citadel ". Thanks to Cairncross, the Soviet secret service was also able to use its own encryption methods to stay one step ahead of its British allies.

After MI5 found incriminating material in its possession, Cairncross admitted in 1951 that it was spying. Some believe that the information he provided about the Western nuclear weapons program started the Soviet one. Even so, he was never punished, which later led to allegations that the government was secretly involved in hiding his role. In fact, the identity of the fifth man in the Cambridge Five remained a mystery until 1990, when KGB defectors Yuri Modin and Oleg Gordijewski incriminated Cairncross.

After his confession, Cairncross moved to Rome , where he worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN until his retirement. Then he retired to the south of France. John Cairncross died in 1995.

He was the brother of the economist Sir Alexander Kirkland Cairncross and the uncle of the journalist Frances Cairncross .

Works

• The Enigma Spy. The Story of the Man who Changed the Course of World War Two , Century, 1997, ISBN 0712678840

literature

• Michael Smith: ENIGMA decrypted - The "Codebreakers" from Bletchley Park . Heyne, 2000, p. 241. ISBN 3-453-17285-X
• Heiner Timmermann, Sergei Alexandrowitsch Kondraschow , Hisaya Shirai: espionage, ideology, myth. The Richard Sorge case , LIT Verlag, Berlin-Hamburg-Münster 2005, ISBN 3825875474
• Richard Davenport-Hines: Cairncross, John (1913-1995), spy. In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of October 2009

Web links

• John Cairncross in the honor roll (Roll of Honor) of Bletchley Park

supporting documents

1. ↑ Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbatchev , London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990, note 5, p. 247.
2. ↑ BBC News: The Cambridge spy ring . Retrieved March 26, 2008.