In 1943 an RAF Pilot Officer, Duncan Taylor, was posted to Bletchley Park. He was married to Barbara Kuczynski, one of a family of German refugees, all of whom seem to have been Soviet agents: the most famous was Barbara's sister Ursula, about whom Ben MacIntyre has written a bestseller, Agent Sonya.
From evidence acquired from investigations into the Kuczynskis, MI5 believed that P/O Taylor was a communist sympathiser, and made enquiries about him to the RAF while he was posted to an Intelligence job in the Middle East. The RAF thought him slightly odd, but certainly not a traitor. After service in the Middle East, he was posted back to the UK: MI5 learned of this from a transcript derived from a telephone tap (available from The National Archives on KV 2/2935):
"Margot rang Barbara (slightly foreign) who said that they had come back on Friday. Barbara said that Margot must be free for Hilary (man) one day. Barbara said that she was in bed cutting out educational articles in the 'Times' that he wants! She said that everything is just the same now between herself and her husband after so long as he has been 2½ years in Egypt. He is now in Bletchley."
On the original document, there is a mark next to "He is now in Bletchley" and one or two authors have made something of it. I think that the lack of any sort of follow-up to this note makes it highly unlikely that whichever MI5 officer saw this realised what Bletchley Park was, or what GC&CS did there: I think it more probable that this was a simple 'note to self' that, if necessary, Taylor could be located.
David Burke's Family Betrayal, one of several books about the Kuczynski family, claims that Barbara had been recruited into the GRU by her sister Ursula, and that Barbara cultivated and kept close to several fellow-travellers who were employed at Bletchley Park. He names Mary Tyler (née Southcombe), Dorothy White (née Gerrish) and Hyam Maccoby.
I know nothing about these three, but it is hard to believe that among the tens of thousands of different people involved in the various aspects of Sigint during different periods of the Second World War one or two fellow-travellers didn't slip through. The question is what difference they made, and the answer, I think, unlike in the case of Cairncross, is likely to be that they made very little difference.
Bletchley Park did not produce the finished, assessed intelligence that was normally produced in the service ministries' intelligence divisions and which would have been of much more value to the USSR. Sigint organisations rarely produce single items of earth-shattering value. The value of their reporting comes from building up a picture out of hundreds or thousands of individual items of traffic. This is why I am dubious about the value of the 5832 documents allegedly passed to the Soviets by Cairncross, especially as none of the information in them could possibly reach Moscow for days or weeks after the time of their transmission. They would contain microscopic fragments of information: "1 SS Panzer Division reports that it is continuing operations in the W and WNW of its sector"; not a full Order of Battle, or the Operational Plan for the Eastern Front.
And only a small proportion of all of those thousands of people who worked in Sigint will have had any access at all to intelligence: the largest part of the work of Bletchley Park was about keeping Bletchley Park in business. This doesn't mean just the people involved in administering the organisation, managing recruiting, accommodating, paying, feeding, and housing the workforce; separate from this the process of working with interception sites to develop and maintain an understanding of how the Axis Armed Forces communicated so that relevant communications could be identified and intercepted when they were needed, was much more complex and labour-intensive than most people realise. My educated guess is that no more than 15% (and probably less) of staff at Bletchley Park were working on intercepted material to produce intelligence, and that after the cryptanalysts, traffic analysts, translators, emenders and indexers had done their work, possibly as few as 2% of staff created or handled Bletchley Park's 'end product', the finished intelligence sent to its customers.
Nobody knows exactly what material Cairncross was giving to his Soviet controller, but the idea that he supplied enough information to enable the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany at Kursk is risible: he could no doubt provide some operational information of interest to the Soviets, but not in a large volume, or in a timely manner; and the relevance of anything that crossed his desk was serendipitous for the Soviets. The big secret that the Soviets learned from Cairncross was that GC&CS was able to break high-grade German ciphers and that it used electromechanical technology as part of its cryptanalytic attack. By comparing what Cairncross revealed with what they were able to do themselves, and with the material they captured from the Germans, the Soviets would also be able to predict how effective UK attacks on German encryption systems would be against Soviet systems.
This brings me to 'need to know'. Everybody who has read about Bletchley Park knows that there was excessive compartmentation of information. Keeping the number of people 'in the know' to a minimum was preferred to spreading the circle of knowledge to anybody who might have been able to take advantage of it. Dilly Knox is reported to have asked: "How do I know whether I need to know something if I don't know what it is?", a point of view with which most of us involved with compartmented classified information will have shared at one point or another, but while excessive need to know will have hampered the efficiency of the organisation, it will also have acted as an effective brake on the activity of any Soviet agents at Bletchley.
Tomorrow I'll look at the only MI5 interrogation of
somebody working at Bletchley Park that I have come across.
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