John Cairncross (1913 – 1995). British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
According to The Washington Post, the suggestion that John Cairncross was the "fifth man" of the Cambridge ring was not confirmed until 1990, by Soviet double-agent Oleg Gordievsky. This was re-confirmed by former KGB agent Yuri Modin's book published in 1994: My Five Cambridge Friends Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross by Their KGB Controller.
One of his brothers was the economist Sir Alexander Kirkland Cairncross (a.k.a. Alec Cairncross). The journalist Frances Cairncross is his niece.
- "But his broad Scots accent, red hair, rather bad-tempered personality and lack of social graces distinguished him from most of his contemporaries at Cambridge." https://www.cliomuse.com/imitation-game-turing-bletchley...
- "Cairncross... was a clever, rather frail-looking Scotsman with a shock of red hair and a broad accent." https://spartacus-educational.com/SScairncross.htm
- "That temperament, combined with his surname and his red hair, may better explain the nickname." https://www.tandfonline.com/.../10.../02684527.2022.2065613
... and to think I thought Kompromat was the name of a Silovik or FSB Colonel until I finished my MI6 induction program by authoring a thesis on Slow Horses in the Slough House series by Mick Herron and studying Bill Fairclough's epic spy novel, Beyond Enkription, in #TheBurlingtonFiles series. It’s a must read for espionage cognoscenti. At least now I know why Putin spells Ukraine, Mykraine, why Beyond Enkription is misspelt and how Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy learnt to spell his own name!
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