40 Facts About John Cairncross

John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War.

John Cairncross was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five.

John Cairncross was notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.

John Cairncross was born at Pine Cottage, Lesmahagow, in Lanarkshire, the youngest of four girls and four boys, of Elizabeth Andrew Wishart, a primary schoolteacher, and Alexander Kirkland John Cairncross, an ironmongery manager.

John 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 Lesmahagow Higher Grade School ; Hamilton Academy; the University of Glasgow; the Sorbonne; and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied French and German.

Biographer Geoff Andrews notes that in 1935, at a time when the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War received great international sympathy, John Cairncross joined the Communist Party of Great Britain while at Cambridge University.

Sir Alec recalled that John Cairncross "was a prickly young man, who was difficult to argue with and resented things rather easily".

An article in the Glasgow Herald on 29 September 1936 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 fifth in the University of Glasgow bursary competition of 1930 and was a Scholar and Bell Exhibitioner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

John Cairncross worked initially in the Foreign Office before transferring to the Treasury and then the Cabinet Office, where he worked as a private secretary to Lord Hankey, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

John Cairncross had access to communications of the German military and intelligence services.

John Cairncross passed decrypted documents through secret channels to the Soviet Union.

John Cairncross smuggled Tunny decrypts due to be destroyed out of Hut 3 in his trousers, transferring them to his bag at the railway station before going to meet his NKVD contact in London, Anatoli Gorsky.

Between 1941 and 1945, John Cairncross supplied the Soviets with 5,832 documents, according to Russian archives.

In Section V, the counter-intelligence section, John Cairncross produced under the direction of Kim Philby an order of battle of the SS.

John Cairncross later suggested that he was unaware of Philby's connections with the Russians.

Yuri Modin, the Russian MGB Controller in London, claims that John Cairncross gave him details of nuclear arms to be stationed with NATO in West Germany.

John Cairncross was at the Ministry of Supply in 1951 and NATO was established in April 1949.

John Cairncross had been trained by the Soviets on how to behave during a counterintelligence interrogation.

On 23 October 1951, John Cairncross informed his Soviet controller that he had merely explained to the interrogator that he did not hide his membership with the party and that he would merely greet Maclean when he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but did not maintain any contact with him after graduation.

The Soviets developed an exfiltration plan for John Cairncross including funds, documents, and communication methods while living in other countries.

John Cairncross did not signal his controller until an early March 1952 meeting during which John Cairncross stated that he had been interrogated again.

The residency did not have any more contact with John Cairncross and instructed Kim Philby to determine John Cairncross's whereabouts.

John Cairncross admitted to some impropriety in 1951 after MI5 found papers in Guy Burgess's flat with a handwritten note from him, after Burgess's flight to Moscow.

John Cairncross claimed that this was the only document that he had ever provided to Burgess.

Evidence from the Soviet archives strongly indicates that John Cairncross supplied to his Soviet handlers early information about British intentions to develop an atomic weapons programme.

In September 1940 John Cairncross was assigned to the office of Maurice Hankey, a minister without portfolio who sat on numerous scientific committees including the MAUD Committee and later the Tube Alloys Consultative Committee.

John Cairncross was never prosecuted, which later led to charges that the government engaged in a conspiracy to cover up his role.

John Cairncross worked independently of the other four and did not share their upper-middle-class backgrounds or tastes.

John Cairncross had resigned from the civil service in late 1952 and forfeited his pension.

In December 1979, John Cairncross was approached by journalist Barrie Penrose and confessed to him.

John Cairncross did not view himself as one of the Cambridge Five, insisting that the information he sent to Moscow was not harmful to Britain and that he had remained loyal to his homeland.

John Cairncross believed that he had been doing a favour to an ally who was being refused information by a "right-wing clique", according to one news item.

John Cairncross was an expert on French authors and translated the works of many 17th century French poets and dramatists such as Jean Racine, Jean de La Fontaine and Pierre Corneille, as well as writing three of his own books, Moliere bourgeois et libertin, New Light on Moliere and After Polygamy was Made a Sin.

In 1967, John Cairncross moved to Rome, where he worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as a translator, taking on work for the Research Office of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Banca d'Italia and IMI.

In 1981, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher informed parliament that John Cairncross was a Soviet agent and was living with his wife in the west of England while he wrote his memoirs.

Unlike many other spies, John Cairncross was never charged with criminally passing information to Moscow.

John Cairncross is depicted in part three of the 2003 BBC TV series Cambridge Spies, where he appears reluctant to continue passing Bletchley Park data to the Russians for fear that the Red Army was heavily penetrated by Abwehr and by Eastern Front military intelligence under General Gehlen.

John Cairncross appears as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, played by Allen Leech.

John Cairncross is portrayed as an unwitting double agent being used as a back-channel by MI6 to pass information to the Soviets that Churchill is too cautious to provide; no historical basis for this is provided.

Historians, and the spy's own autobiography, have confirmed that John Cairncross was spying for the Soviets because of his own views, and that this was not discovered by MI6 until long after the end of WWII.