John Cairncross - Background

Background

Cairncross's father was the manager of an ironmongers and his mother a primary school teacher, John Cairncoss was one of a family of eight, many of whom had distinguished careers. All three of his brothers became professors. One was the economist Sir Alexander Kirkland Cairncross (a.k.a. Alec Cairncross). His niece was the journalist Frances Cairncross. Cairncross grew up in Lesmahagow, a small town on the edge of moorland, near Lanark in the Central Belt of Scotland, and was educated at the Hamilton Academy; the University of Glasgow; the Sorbonne and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied French and German.

After graduating, he took the British Civil Service exam and came in first place. In an article appearing in the Glasgow Herald on 29 September 1936 it was noted that John Cairncross had scored an "outstanding double success of being placed 1st in the Home List and 1st in the competition for the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service," and that he had been placed 5th in the (Glasgow University) bursary competition of 1930, and was also a Scholar and Bell Exhibitioner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Cairncross worked initially in the Cabinet Office as a private secretary to Lord Hankey, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Later he transferred to the Foreign Office. It has been suggested that in 1937 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. But he was not noted whilst at Cambridge for any political activity. He was regarded as rather austere and uncommunicative as an undergraduate. In 1942 and 1943 he worked on ULTRA ciphers at Bletchley Park and then joined MI6. His motivation in passing Ultra transcripts relating to German battle plans on the Eastern Front was, he always claimed, purely to hasten the end of the war. It was in this time considered to be in British interest that the Soviet Union was made aware of German military plans, but not how they were obtained. Thus, only paraphrased information was passed to the Russians. By providing verbatim transcripts, Cairncross showed that the British were breaking German codes.

It is probable that he was posted to Bletchley Park by MI6, as assignments there were not by request. During his time there, he passed documents through secret channels to the Soviet Union. While at Bletchley Park, he supplied the Soviets with advance intelligence from ULTRA about Operation Citadel. This led to the Battle of Kursk, the world's largest tank battle, which set the seal on final defeat for the Wehrmacht in the East. Full details of both the northern and southern attack routes to cut off the Kursk salient were provided in meticulous detail. The information he supplied enabled the Red Army to build several lines of defence with camouflaged anti-tank guns, exacting terrible carnage from the attacking armoured formations (panzers). It had proved a real challenge to British Intelligence to get this war-winning information in front of Stalin without revealing the secret of ULTRA. This essentially settled the war against Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front.