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36 BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND
Soviets would not accept his warnings because 'direct evidence
was not forthcoming'. Depressed, he went back to Bletchley Park
in February 1943, never to return to Moscow. He joined the staff
at Bletchley Park amI tried to keep the relationship going at a
distance, 'but the temperature was falling'. The Director,
Commander Edward navis, was only willing to allow the relationship
to continue 'if it is a solid gain for us'. The Polyarnoe
naval listening station continued to function, but with the Soviets
turning the tide on the Eastern Front they seemed to feel no
need for further cooperation, and other contacts 'petered out' .24
On 9 February 1944, London discussed the possibility of a visit
to Britain by Soviet cypher experts and decided against it. 2s
Bletchley Park's heated debate on what information to give
to the Soviets was academic. All along, one of the KGB's top
agents, John Cairncross, had been working at Bletchley.
Although Cairncross studied at Cambridge in the early 1930s,
he was not recruited by Anthony Blunt, one of the key KGB
talent scouts there, who found him both quarrelsome and arrogant.
Instead, after Cairncross joined the Foreign Office in 1936,
he was persuaded to work for Soviet intelligence by James
Klugman, a prominem British Communist, who later served in
the wartime Special Operations Executive. Although Cairncross
was fearsomely intelligent, his difficult personality ensured that
he was always being moved on. At the outbreak of the war
with Germany he was sent to the Cabinet Office to work for
the Cabinet Secretary, Lord Hankey. There he saw some of the
early British thinking on the development of the atomic bomb.
In 1941 he was moved to Bletchley Park, labouring in Hut Three
on the Luftwaffe order of battle. His moment of triumph came
in early 1943 when he was able to warn his KGB controller of
the impending German armoured offensive at Kursk. Codenamed
'Operation Citadel', this was the last great German push
on the Eastern Front. It proved to be the largest tank battle of
the Second World War, and the information provided by
Cairncross proved to be important in launching an early attack
upon the German tactical air force, much of which was destroyed