The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

The last of the Magnificent Five to be recruited, and later the last to be publicly exposed, was the “Fifth Man,” John Cairncross, a brilliant Scot who in 1934 had entered Trinity at the age of twenty-one with a scholarship in modern languages, having already studied for two years at Glasgow University and gained a licence ès lettres at the Sorbonne.⁶¹ His passionate Marxism led the Trinity Magazine to give him the nickname “The Fiery Cross,” while his remarkable facility as a linguist led the same magazine to complain, “Cairncross… learns a new language every fortnight.” ⁶² Among his college teachers in French literature was Anthony Blunt, though Cairncross later claimed that they never discussed Communism.⁶³ In 1936, after graduating with first-class honors, Cairncross passed top of the Foreign Office entrance examinations, one hundred marks ahead of the next candidate (though he did less well at the interview).⁶⁴

After Blunt had acted as talent-spotter, the initial approach to Cairncross early in 1937 was entrusted by Deutsch to Burgess⁶⁵—much as Philby had made the first recruitment overture to Maclean in 1934. The actual recruitment of Cairncross shortly afterwards was entrusted to James Klugmann.⁶⁶ On April 9 Maly informed the Centre that Cairncross had been formally recruited and given the codename MOLIÈRE.⁶⁷ Had Cairncross known his codename, he might well have objected to its transparency but would undoubtedly have found appropriate the choice of his favorite French writer, on whom he later published two scholarly studies in French. For reasons not recorded in KGB files, the codename MOLIÈRE was later replaced by that of LISZT.⁶⁸ In May Klugmann arranged Cairncross’s first rendezvous with Deutsch. According to Cairncross’s admittedly unreliable memoirs, the meeting took place one evening in Regent’s Park:

Suddenly there emerged from behind the trees a short, stocky figure aged around forty, whom Klugmann introduced to me as Otto. Thereupon, Klugmann promptly disappeared…⁶⁹

Deutsch reported to Moscow that Cairncross “was very happy that we had established contact with him and was ready to start working for us at once.”⁷⁰

Among the pre-Second World War Foreign Office documents available to both Maclean and Cairncross, and thus to the NKVD, were what Cairncross described as “a wealth of valuable information on the progress of the Civil War in Spain.”⁷¹ Only in a few cases, however, is it possible to identify individual documents supplied by Maclean and Cairncross which the Centre forwarded to Stalin, probably in the form of edited extracts.⁷² One such document, which seems to have made a particular impression on Stalin, is the record of talks with Hitler in November 1937 by Lord Halifax, Lord President of the Council (who, three months later, was to succeed Eden as Foreign Secretary).⁷³ Halifax’s visit to Hitler’s mountain lair, the “Eagle’s Nest” at Berchtesgaden, got off to a farcical start. As the aristocratic Halifax stepped from his car, he mistook Hitler for a footman and was about to hand him his hat and coat when a German minister hissed in his ear, “Der Führer! Der Führer! ⁷⁴ The Centre, however, saw the whole meeting as deeply sinister. The extracts from Halifax’s record of his talks with Hitler, tailored to fit Stalin’s profound distrust of British policy, emphasized that Britain viewed Nazi Germany as “the bastion of the West against Bolshevism” and would take a sympathetic view of German expansion to the east.⁷⁵ Though Halifax’s assessment of Hitler, whom he regarded as “very sincere,” was lamentably naive, his record of his comments on Germany’s role in defending the West against Communism were much more qualified than the Centre’s version of them. He told Hitler: