Last week’s article (I Spy, with…) elicited a number of interesting responses. One reader revealed that, in the 1960s, he had worked with John Cairncross – the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. Cairncross had come to Karachi from FAO in Rome, as part of a Harvard Advisory Group to work with Pakistan’s Planning Commission.
According to my reader, Cairncross ‘had constructed the persona of a bumbling intellectual’, whereas ‘he actually had a sharp brain’. ‘This cover enabled him to get access to all sorts of people who thought him harmless. When he left the Planning Commission to go teach at a university in the United States, he asked all of us not to let his wife (who had been left behind in Rome) know where he had gone. The habit of deception apparently covered not only relations with his country, but also with his family’.
Cairncross had kept his early career as well hidden. In the Second World War, he was the only Soviet spy ‘to penetrate the ultra-secret codebreaking and signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency at Bletchley Park’. In 1940, he reported to the Soviet Union that the British planned the production of atomic weapons. Later, he worked for the Foreign Office, the Treasury, for one of Churchill’s ministers, and then with MI6.
He and the others in the Cambridge Five – Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt – were known admiringly within the Russian KGB as ‘The Magnificent Five’. Burgess, Maclean and Philby defected to the Soviet Union. To their chagrin, they discovered that the grass was no greener (or redder) on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Cairncross and Blunt did not defect. Even after their exposure and confessions, they were allowed to remain in the U.K.. Blunt continued his research into the 17th century French painter Nicolas Poussin and Cairncross concentrated on the works of the 17th century author Molière. As Molière was itself a pseudonym adopted by the writer Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, the KGB with droll wit gave Cairncross the code name: Molière.
Another reader, who had been posted in the Pakistan embassy in Moscow in the early 1970s, recalled a brief encounter with Kim Philby. Shopping in a Beriozka Store where diplomats could buy provisions only with foreign currency, he noticed Kim Philby at the food counter. Behind Philby stood a muscular Russian, obviously a minder.
‘When I saw a small distance between Philby and this KGB officer, I walked up to him and said in English “Pleasure meeting you, Mr. Philby”. Philby reacted sharply: ‘’Who are you? Why do you want to speak with me?’’ Within a second, the burly KGB official joined us. He demanded to know why I wanted to speak with Philby. I responded that I was merely asking the gentleman in which section I could get good quality meat. Philby was immediately escorted out of the store. For days afterwards, I became a celebrity in Moscow’s diplomatic community for having met the elusive Kim Philby.’
Philby’s betrayal of his country had resulted in the deaths of many British agents. In his own country, he was reviled; in Russia, he was honoured with a plaque installed in the Intelligence service headquarters in Moscow. In 1971, he married a Russian woman Pukhova, to whom in a moment of candour, he confessed: ‘I came here totally full of information. I wanted to give everything I had, but no one was interested’.
Disappointed, Philby lapsed into a near-fatal alcoholism. He retained one connection with home – ‘A cup of English tea with milk at 5pm, drunk from a fine porcelain cup’.
Foreign spies in Pakistan are less documented. They insinuated themselves into society, often through strategic marriages. None wrote autobiographies, comparable to Kim Philby’s My Silent War (1968) or John Cairncross’ The Enigma Spy, published posthumously in 1997.
Pakistan has, however, allowed itself to be used by others for intelligence gathering. In the 1960s, the U.S. flew U-2 spy aircraft from the Badaber base near Peshawar on missions over Russia. One pilot – Gary Powers – admitted that his was the first attempt ‘to fly all the way across the Soviet Union [.] The planned route would take us deeper into Russia than we had ever gone, while traversing important targets never before photographed.’ The Soviets brought him down with their newly developed S-75 Dvina missile.
In the early 1970s, PIA enjoyed the unique privilege of flying to Beijing. A rumour abounded that its aircraft had been fitted with cameras (allegedly installed by the CIA) to take photographs over Chinese territory. It did not take long for the Chinese to discover the ruse. They ignored this infraction by their future ‘iron brother’. They needed Pakistan as the channel for the clandestine Sino-U.S. rapprochement.
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
[DAWN, 3 Sept., 2026]
