home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text id=91TT2206>
- <title>
- Oct. 07, 1991: A "Fifth Man" Is Unmasked
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Oct. 07, 1991 Defusing the Nuclear Threat
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 35
- COMMUNISTS
- Mystery's End: A "Fifth Man" Is Unmasked At Last
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Who was the "Fifth Man," the British spy for the Soviet Union
- who worked with Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and
- Anthony Blunt during and after World War II? For four decades,
- espionage fans have had no shortage of suspects. Last year
- Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky published a book, KGB: The
- Inside Story, in which he fingered a scholarly Cambridge
- graduate named John Cairncross as the mystery man. Cairncross
- admitted long ago that he spied for the Soviets, but at the
- level of a footsoldier and in an effort to aid a wartime ally.
- The British government believed him and in 1951 allowed him to
- leave England. Now 78, he lives quietly in the south of France.
- </p>
- <p> Last week Cairncross came clean. "I was made one of the
- Five during the war," he told the London paper the Mail on
- Sunday. While working at Britain's code and cipher school, he
- provided the Soviets with decoded messages that helped them
- defeat the Germans at Kursk in 1943. Later in the war, while
- serving in MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service, he told
- the Soviets about Allied plans for the future of Yugoslavia.
- Reflecting on his wartime misdeeds, he says, "I hope this will
- finally put an end to the `Fifth Man' mystery."
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-